Re: GNUstep and valgrind

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

> On 16 Mar 2018, at 15:44, Fred Kiefer <fredkiefer@gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> Am 16.03.2018 um 16:32 schrieb Richard Frith-Macdonald 
>> <richard.frith-macdonald@theengagehub.com>:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On 16 Mar 2018, at 15:18, amon <amon@vnl.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>>          [arglist release];
>>> arglist = [[[NSMutableString stringWithCString: [cmdline cString]]
>>>             componentsSeparatedByString: DELIM] retain];
>>> 
>>> This happens inside an init. arglist is release by the dealloc
>>> method. However, NSMutableString insists on making it autoreleased.
>>> I want to make it not do that. 
>> 
>> Portable GNUstep code would look like this:
>> 
>> CREATE_AUTORELEASE_POOL(pool);
>> ASSIGN(arglist, [[[NSMutableString stringWithCString: [cmdline cString]] 
>> componentsSeparatedByString: DELIM]);
>> DESTROY(pool);
>> 
>> with no wasted/leaked memory.
> 
> I have to disagree. This will get rid of the intermediate NSMutableString but 
> later on when the surrounding Foo object gets released the arglist ivar will 
> get released as well, but the component strings in that array will still 
> remain in what ever autorelease pool is active at that time and will only get 
> freed when that pool is cleaned up.

That's (almost always) wrong.  Releasing a container does not put its contents 
into an autorelease pool, it releases them all. so the components get 
released/deallocated at the point when the array is deallocated.

Of course you can never guarantee that a class will behave normally (if you 
don't have access to its source code), but generally when an object is 
deallocated it releases all its instance variables.

In this instance I think it's fair to assume we are talking about the GNUstep 
NSMutableString class generating components in a GNUstep NSArray, so we know 
that we don't have some perverse implementation and the above three-line 
solution is all that's needed to ensure no leaked objects.

However, I agree that if someone had for instance re-implemented 
-componentsSeparatedByString: in a category of NSMutableString, and their 
re-implementation had created an NSArray subclass which, on deallocation, would 
put the array contents into an autorelease pool rather than releasing them, 
then you could get the situation you describe where the components would be 
placed in a pool at the point when the array ivar is released.