On 9 Feb 2011, at 20:06, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> You're missing Tor's point. Yes, all memory leaks are bad, but
> most (all?) of the instances of not-explicitly-released memory
> in the GTK stack are _not_ leaks. If you still have a pointer to
> it, it ain't a leak, even if a dumb debugger says so.
>
But my original example looked like this:-
Gtk::Main *app = new Gtk::Main (&argc, &argv);
delete app;
How could there possibly be valid pointers still lurking after those
operations? Sure, there'll be pointers and they'll be pointing to some memory
- but neither of them is valid any more. I think what Tor meant (and this does
admittedly have some validity) was that the un-released memory will eventually
(in fact, soon) be released by the operating system anyway, so what purpose
does it serve to release it specifically? My argument against that was that it
makes it a lot easier for a leak detecting utility to do its job properly.
But quite apart from that, there's bound to be a suspicion about whether the
true reason for not fixing such leaks is really one of scale. Remember that
just that one gtkmm call left me with literally hundreds of leaks. Supposing
there'd only been six leaks. Would that have imbued more motivation to plug
them? I suspect the answer is "yes".
John
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