[MPlayer-dev-eng] Where to free loose memory?

[Joey Parrish]

On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 02:57:34PM -0400, D Richard Felker III wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 02:04:25PM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> > Partly on the offchance that it would be useful and partly as a way to
> > see and learn the code (in some more comprehensive way than the
> > skim-over-while-changing-printfs I've done so far), I'm currently
> > running mplayer inside valgrind in an attempt to track down and fix any
> > memory leaks and so forth. (There are quite a number reported, but most
> > seem to be problems in external libraries.) Note that I have no
> > intention of submitting this work for actual use unless people indicate
> > that such would be desirable; I'm not at all confident in my skills in
> > such areas, this is mostly just a way for me to try to learn the code
> > and get in a bit of practice in the process.
> > 
> > Is there any one canonical place, or group of places, where memory is
> > supposed to be freed - one of the exit_* functions, perhaps - or should
> > I just make my best guess as to a place which is after the final use of
> > the variable in question?
> 
> freeing memory in exit_* functions is useless. if it's just a block of
> memory allocated for the whole duration of the program, it never needs
> to be freed. free is useful for things that can get allocated again
> and again (and thus cause memory usage to keep growing if they're not
> freed).

At least on *nix... who knows what windows memory management does...

--Joey

-- 
All philosophy is naïve.