Re: [Tinycc-devel] C language modification using TinyCC - problems

[Peter Fröhlich]

Hi all,

On May 20, 2005, at 14:03, James Dunne wrote:

> The problem is at it's worst when multiple concatenations are strung
> together as in s1 ~ s2 ~ s3.  You lose the reference to the char *
> allocated by s1 ~ s2 since it is fed into ~ s3.  Perhaps this should
> be disallowed and only ~= should exist.

I might be wrong, but isn't this a *basic* problem in languages that 
are not garbage collected? You simply can't allow basic operators that 
can be composed into arbitrary expressions to allocate memory, you'll 
always have a leak if you do.

What am I missing, i.e. how can you ensure you're leak-free? Especially 
in light of stuff like

  s1 ~ f(t1 ~ t2) ~ s2

where you have an intervening function call as well (which, I assume, 
you don't rule out)? Of course in this case some blame could be put on 
the author of f() as well...

Peter

PS: And of course in this light the interface of malloc() is hopelessly 
flawed, it should not return a pointer but rather write the address it 
allocated to a pointer that is passed in by reference...
--
Peter H. Froehlich <><><><><><> http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~phf/
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