Re: memory leak & patch

[Kenneth Lorber]

        From scjones@thor.sdrc.com Wed Jun 11 17:02:22 2003
        Subject: Re: memory leak & patch
        To: keni@his.com (Kenneth Lorber)
        Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 14:47:06 -0400 (EDT)
        Cc: bug-cvs@gnu.org
        In-Reply-To: <200306111653.h5BGr0e01592@nethack.home> from "Kenneth 
Lorber" at Jun 11, 2003 12:53:00 PM
        From: lawrence.jones@eds.com (Larry Jones)

        Ahh, right you are!  I missed the wheat amongst the chaff.  I've checked
        in your fix.  Thanks!
You're welcome.

        > [free everything for debugging]

        While that's a noble goal, it's essentially unachievable in a language
        like C -- error exits would have to return normally all the way up the
        call stack to give each routine a chance to clean up.
It can vary from hard to impossible, depending on the project - one large
project I work on just happens to be structured so that it's only hard, and
we manage to free everything (except some things allocated deep in libc) -
it makes seeing that you've forgotten to clean up something very easy and
is good for finding a lot of problems.

        [... definitions ]
        CVS tries very hard to avoid memory leaks in that sense;
        it makes no attempt whatsoever to avoid memory leaks in
        your sense.
Sorry - I didn't mean to step on a design decision (I was just trying very
hard to get Purify to be happy - BTW it's not happy yet.)

        -Larry Jones
keni