Re: GTK+ 2.10.7 released

[Davyd Madeley <davyd madeley id au>]

On Sat, 2007-01-06 at 04:44 -0800, Sergei Steshenko wrote:

> OK, on the official gtk site one can read:
> 
> http://www.gtk.org/faq/#AEN703 :
> 
> "
> 5.28. Why does GTK+/GLib leak memory?
> 
> It doesn't. 
> ...
> ".
> 
> I read this in the times of, I think, gtk+-2.8.18, and it is still there.
> 
> So are there or there are no memory leaks in gtk+-2.8.20 ?

There may be some, people make mistakes. When they're found, they're
fixed in the latest stable GTK+ (at this time, 2.10.x). In general, it's
the application that's at fault for leaking memory, not GTK+.

> Did gtk+2.10.* introduce more or less memory leaks ?

It may have introduced some, again, people make mistakes, some of these
may also have been long standing.

> If one reads on http://www.gtk.org about absence of memory leaks, should
> he/she consider this to be cheap propaganda at best ?
> 
> Or the above claim should be reformulated as:
> 
> * for gtk+2.8.20 there are no known to developers occurences of memory leaks;
> * gtk+2.10.* is effectively a developmnet release, so expect memory leaks and stay
> away from it for production code.

No, this is wrong. GTK+ 2.10 is also stable code. Development releases
have odd-numbered versions, eg. GTK+ 2.9, GTK+ 2.11, etc. Once again, it
is not expected that there will be memory leaks, but people do make
mistakes.

> FWIW, 'konqueror' WEB browser doesn't appear to leak, while gtk+-based
> Mozilla, Firfox, Seamonkey leak a lot, and I'm not sure whether it's
> 'Gecko' or gtk+ issue.

This is Mozilla's fault. 99% of the time, any memory leaks you're
noticing are the fault of the application and not of GTK+. Memory leaks
in GTK+, like with any large library are usually the result of
uncommonly used code paths, are usually not very large and don't come up
very often.

Hope this clears some things up.

--davyd

-- 
Davyd Madeley

http://www.davyd.id.au/
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