GC leak?

[Jerry James]

On Feb 1, 2008 1:23 AM, Marcus Crestani
<crestani at informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> wrote:
> Currently the garbage collector does not run the finalizers when
> XEmacs exits.  This is bad, we should definitely fix this.  I see if I
> can come up with a patch in the next couple of days.

It isn't necessarily bad.  Java doesn't guarantee that your finalizers
will ever be run, for example, so a standards-compliant JVM can behave
in exactly the same way.  And there's really no reason to run
finalizers on exit for the vast majority of objects.  That will just
make XEmacs take longer to shut down all the way.  All memory is going
to be released and all file descriptors closed by the OS, after all.

All this means is that the information reported by valgrind on exit
can't be trusted.  That's okay, because valgrind doesn't understand
how we allocate and manage memory anyway.  I'm going to look at
inserting valgrind macros into judicious places in the code so we can
get runtime reports on leaked and uninitialized memory.  If there
isn't any, then I'm happy. :-)

Regards,
-- 
Jerry James
http://loganjerry.googlepages.com/