Robert Elz <[email protected]> wrote: > Why would anyone ever care?
Okay, there's one "no" vote. But I think it is based on a misunderstanding of my proposal. I agree with Robert that we don't care if a program allocates a lot of memory that it doesn't free before exiting. And I'm not proposing to change that, which would, as Robert points out, make the code more complicated for no performance gain. What I am proposing is to re-arrange the code slightly to show ASan that we don't care. That would 1) make it easier to use ASan and 2) make it easier to find leaks we do care about. Whether the resulting code is "mangled" is a matter of opinion and important to deciding whether to make the change; I invite people to study the sample patch in my proposal. And yes, there are leaks we care about. If a program were to leak memory in proportion to the amount of data it processes, then the resulting memory growth would limit the size of the folder the program could operate on. That Robert (and I) have hit no such limit speaks to the quality of the nmh code base: it is most likely that there is no such progressive leak. A fact that supports a "no" vote against this work; as I said, it won't find bugs right away. Like valgrind, ASan lets you ignore certain conditions. I have been using ASan productively with the option "detect_leaks=false", and I can continue to do so. < Stephen
