Re: [Bug-readline] Memory leaks (identified with valgrind)

[John Darrington]

On Sun, Mar 06, 2016 at 03:20:16PM -0500, Chet Ramey wrote:
     On 3/6/16 7:56 AM, Timothe Litt wrote:
     > readline 6.3 under Fedora Linux.
     > (same failures with 6.2)
     > 
     > Any trivial program using readline leaks memory. 
     
     These are not leaks; this is simply allocated memory to which the
     application still has a handle when the program exits.

This may well be true.  But having these hanging around can mask other blocks
of allocated memory which really are leaks.

     
     > I suggest that readline establish an "atexit" function during 
initialization
     > that will cleanup... or  (less desirable) provide a suitable function
     > for the
     > application to call "atexit".
     

In fact, a library which calls atexit is highly undesireable.  The reason is, 
that if
your program also calls atexit (or another library you're linking against does) 
then
you have no control over which "atexit" payload gets called first.

J'



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