Re: how to pass a malloc'd C string over to be managed by the GC

[Sam Johnson via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Thursday, 28 February 2019 at 03:33:25 UTC, Sam Johnson wrote:
```
string snappyCompress(const string plaintext) {
	import deimos.snappy.snappy : snappy_compress, 
snappy_max_compressed_length, SNAPPY_OK;
        import core.stdc.stdlib : malloc, free;
        import std.string : fromStringz, toStringz;
        char *input = cast(char *) toStringz(plaintext);
	size_t output_length = 
snappy_max_compressed_length(plaintext.length);
        char *output = cast(char *) malloc(output_length);
	if(snappy_compress(input, plaintext.length, output, 
&output_length) == SNAPPY_OK) {
                string ret = (cast(string) fromStringz(output)).clone();
                // <---- do something magical here
                return ret;
        }
        assert(0);
}
```
[...]

Ignore the `.clone()` call -- that wasn't supposed to be here -- 
I thought maybe string.clone() might exist but it turns out it 
does not.