Re: [gpsd-dev] [PATCH 2/2] hacking: mention strdup in the no-malloc section.

[Paul Fertser]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 08:17:16AM -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Sanjeev Gupta <address@hidden>:
> > On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 6:30 AM, Fred Wright <address@hidden> wrote:
> > 
> > > One way to look at it is that the problem isn't malloc() - it's free().
> > 
> > 
> > So, let us allow use of malloc(), just ban free() ?
> 
> Oh ghods no.  We'd get memory leaks for sure.

Am I the only one who thought Sanjeev was just kidding? :)

> No, the right thing to do is ban any function that requires a following
> free() to deallocate the storage it allocates.

Explicit free() or any other "release" that does free() or other
resource management implicitly (e.g. fclose()). Nowadays there's a
wonderful tool to track leaks: valgrind, it would probably be fair to
require one to do a valgrind testing for any new code that involves
resource allocation.

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