Re: RFC: glocal - automatically freeing memory when it goes out of scope

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel kamstrup canonical com>]

On 05/29/2012 07:23 PM, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen<mikkel kamstrup canonical com>  writes:
>
> > I have been looking at gcc's "cleanup" attribute[1] that allows one to
> > specify a callback that will be invoked when a variable goes out of
> > scope. This allows one to play with automatically freeing resources.
>
> Is it possible to combine use of this GCC-specific attribute with
> the concept in Doug Gwyn's "mostly-portable" alloca
> implementation, so that you would end up with something that
> works pretty much everywhere (but is more efficient with GCC)?
>
> Here's one copy of the Doug Gwyn alloca that just happened to be
> on the top of the results of my web search:
>          ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/fonts/utilities/ps2mf/alloca.c

There is already g_alloca() and g_newa() for allocating on the stack.

I'va also been thinking quite a lot about how we could leverage stack 
allocation to get rid of even more memory management hassles.

One could conceivably introduce *a() variants of various key calls, like 
g_strdupa(), g_strdupa_printf(), maybe array types g_{ptr_,}array_newa, 
etc. Noting that GList and GSList doesn't strictly need special variants 
as you can already stack allocate them as they are fully defined 
structs. Although g_list_prependa() and friends would be more convenient.

It will bloat the API quite a lot though that's why I never seriously 
proposed it. Another solution would be to have a g_push/pop_allocator() 
kind of thing. Didn't think too deeply about it though.

Cheers,
Mikkel