Re: lynx-dev Question about --enable-find-leaks

[Thomas Dickey]

> 
> As suggested by Leonid I added --enable-find-leaks to my
> color-style Cygwin build.
> 
> The question is what happens when a memory leak is found ?

While running, lynx keeps track of all of the allocated memory.  On exit
it walks through the list of chunks that were never freed and writes a
report (Lynx.leaks) to the current directory.  That's useful for some
types of leaks - but some of the reallocations are done at a low-level
by utility functions that don't give much context regarding where the
real allocation was done.  Besides keeping track, lynx also does a little
more work to free up memory that would confuse the reporting (ncurses can
be compiled to provide similar memory-freeing, for this purpose).

Comparable to lynx's built-in checks, one can compile with dmalloc.

Better - to use tools that can show the stack trace for each leak.
Those aren't portable (purify is a commerical tool; valgrind is
a recent tool something like that which runs on linux).

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden> <address@hidden>
http://dickey.his.com
ftp://dickey.his.com

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