>Do people want patches to quiet AddressSanitizer's leaks detector? > >I've started testing my patches with AddressSanitizer. >By default, ASan produces many errors messages about memory >leaks in nmh.
So, Robert already commented on this, but my answer is more subtle. Memory management in nmh is a mess. This is partially because the code is old and things weren't such a concern back then, and partially because (as Robert already pointed out) all of the programs are short-running and exit very quickly, so even with poor memory management there generally isn't a real impact. I personally think this should be cleaned up, because (a) this is just sloppy and (b) it makes it difficult to create a library that other packages could use. This is admittedly a pie-in-the-sky idea. However, there are a bunch of practical concerns about tracking these things down. Specifically, I think many of the relevant APIs aren't really suited for dealing with this. One of my other pie-in-the-sky ideas is to create betters API that would have some defined memory management , but who knows when that will happen. That being said ... I _did_ try to do that with, for example, the netsec API. If there are memory leaks there, I want to know about them! I guess I would say, "Give it a shot and we'll see how bad those things are". Some things we might fix, others we would just have to live with. I do know that with programs like valgrind, for example, you can define things to ignore; if ASan has that, we could maybe just ignore the things we are going to live with. --Ken
