Re: GTK+ is not Valgrind-friendly

[muppet <scott asofyet org>]

On Thursday, April 29, 2004, at 08:41 PM, Paul Pogonyshev wrote:

> I find Valgrind to be very useful in detecting memory access errors 
> and leaks.  However, GTK+ leaves lots of unfreed memory at process 
> termination, which makes Valgrind output for a GTK+ application way 
> less usable and clean.  I have about 1 MB of unfreed memory in about 
> 140--150 loss records after a typical run of my program.

in its defense, gtk+ (and glib) allocate quite a few structures which 
don't make any sense unless they live for the life of the app.  i 
decided to take the easy way out -- here's the suppression file i 
created for using valgrind on gtk2-perl.

http://asofyet.org/muppet/software/gtk2-perl/gtk.supp


> A new global function is declared, say gtk_free_all_memory().  This 
> function is not required to be called and it's up to each programmer 
> to decide whether to invoke it upon program termination.  It should be 
> guarded with some preprocessor symbol to avoid unnecessary 
> dependancies on new GTK+ versions.  A program that is wanted to have 
> "cleaner" memory profile could then look like this:

well, a simple g_at_exit() would take care of that for all cases, 
without having to introduce a new function to the public API.


--
Walk softly, and carry a BFG-9000.
  -- unknown