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How much should I cleanup?
- From: David Carlton <carlton at math dot stanford dot edu>
- To: gdb <gdb at sources dot redhat dot com>
- Date: 11 Feb 2003 15:40:51 -0800
- Subject: How much should I cleanup?
When is it important to make sure that I have cleanups in place? My
understanding is that it's important if I have control of a block of
memory that I want to xfree() after doing some work, but where that
xfree() might not be reached because of exceptional circumstances.
So, if that's correct: what are 'exceptional circumstances'? I assume
error() and related functions count. I don't know exactly what QUIT
does; do I have to be careful if there are QUIT's in between the
xmalloc() and the xfree()? (Are those the only places where GDB pays
attention to ^C's?) Any other situations?
Sigh. C has its benefits, but ease of memory management isn't one of
them. Every time I have to write a cleanup function, every time I
have to think about whether to alloca() memory for a string or to
xmalloc() it (and every time I can't alloca() it because I'm returning
the string in question), I get another grey hair. (Though the grey
hair falls out soon thereafter, for better or for worse.)
David Carlton
carlton@math.stanford.edu