Gnome and Gtk applications have memory leaks?

[Bruno Abrunhosa Pires Marinho <bapm camoes rnl ist utl pt>]

Hi fellows.

Maybe someone already discussed this but here it goes:

After using gnome applications I found out that applications don't free
memory used on widgets. Using gtop and following the memory usage of one
of the gnome applications like gtt I found that the memory usage increases
every time I open a dialog box but the memory usage does not decrease
after I close the dialog box and even increases again if I open the same
dialog box again. This means that the program doesn't free memory used on
widgets. This is a big problem because linux does not crash too often and
we can be using an application for too long. This leads to the fact that  
we might end up with an application that eats all the memory.

All this leads to the fact that programmers are not well informed on gtk 
and gnome tutorials that they must free widgets after using them if they 
are not going to be used later. 

All this is valid if gtk and gnome don't support any kind of garbage
collection. If garbage collection exist and like all garbage collection
systems run from time to time I want to apologize for this email.

Bye and keep up the good work.

                                               Bruno Pires Marinho
                                           bapm@camoes.rnl.ist.utl.pt
                                      http://camoes.rnl.ist.utl.pt/~bapm/