RE: dealloc (Correction)

Lim Hock-Chai wrote on 07/12/2006 02:33:10 PM:

If the based pointer already pointed to an allocate memory, shouldn't
you dealloc it first before calling subprocedure that return a pointer?
Otherwise you might cause memory leak (I think). 

You're right that there would be a danger of memory leak in that case.  My 
rule of thumb is that the module that allocates memory should be 
responsible for deallocating it, so I'd never pass my only pointer to a 
manually allocated field to a procedure that might clear that pointer. 
However, it's not hard to copy a pointer to a temp field, and then pass 
it.  I'm not sure if that's completely valid or not, but that's how I 
learned it, and it generally works out well for me.  Mind you, most of the 
manual allocation/deallocation I've done has been in other languages, but 
I think the basic concepts and practices should be the same.

 

The compiler checking I'm referring to is more like in the source code
you do something like this: myField_BasePointer = *null;  (from
everybody's posting, seems like you should always do dealloc(n)
myField_BasePoniter)

See Scott's point about multiple pointers to the same memory.

 

I'm really not too worry about the based pointer pointing to an invalid
address (May be I should).  I'm more concerned about the memory leak
(Memory is cheap, may be I just worry too much.  Then again, Chirs just
should us a few lines of code that could allocated 300+ GB of memory
:)).

Don't get me wrong ... memory leaks can be very, very bad, and are at 
least equally hard to track down as non-nulled pointers.  I'm just saying 
that I'm happy to take care of it myself, because I don't think it's 
practical for the compiler (or OS) to do it for me.

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