Re: GMemVTable broken

[Philip Chimento <philip chimento gmail com>]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 8:50 PM, Jasper St. Pierre <jstpierre mecheye net> wrote:

Yeah, we've all been sort of aware of this for some time. I've abused
it to the fact where I know that malloc and g_new / free and g_free
will *always* be the same since a specific glib version.

I think removing all the code is fine.

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 8:38 PM, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:
> So, I just tried to use the memory profiler in glib, and I crashes
> really early because the gobject constructor (gobject_init_ctor) calls
> g_malloc before main() is reached.
>
> This means g_mem_set_vtable() is impossible to use. I don't necessarily
> think this is all that bad. Honestly we should never have made it a
> vtable (one extra vfunc per malloc...) and instead do memory profiling
> etc the "normal" way, i.e. LD_PRELOAD something with malloc
> interceptors. Maybe we should just remove all this code and keep
> g_mem_set_vtable as a dummy function that prints a deprecation warning?

Would it be possible to write a how-to page on the Gnome wiki that the documentation of the now-deprecated function would point to? 

I'm afraid that new developers would be the ones hit hardest by this. I certainly used g_mem_set_vtable to my benefit when I was first starting out with the Gnome stack. I could now figure out how to do memory profiling the "normal" way, as you say, on my own, but I certainly wouldn't have been able to 8 years ago.

Regards,

--

Philip