This is the mail archive of the gcc-patches@gcc.gnu.org mailing list for the GCC project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: Release RTL bodies after compilation (sometimes)


On Tue, 2004-09-14 at 15:19, Diego Novillo wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-09-14 at 16:51, Jeffrey A Law wrote:
> 
> > The problem is your change to explicitly call ggc_free bypasses the
> > entire GC mechanisms we've built.  As I've stated before, if you
> > can't be absolutely sure that there are no pointers left into your
> > object, then the object is _NOT_ a candidate for ggc_free.  I can't
> > emphasize this enough.
> > 
> Heartily agree.  Sprinkling ggc_free is a dead give away that we are
> papering over some basic memory management design problem.
> 
> Either we shouldn't be using GC here, or the collection mechanism is not
> good enough.  All this random explicit deallocation is a perfect recipe
> for disaster and extremely hard to track bugs.
You know, if calling ggc_free "fixes" a memory leak, then well, the
ggc_free is wrong, no other way to look at it.

ggc_free's only purpose should be to return objects to the GC pool
faster (ie, before the next collection point).  Any other use is
simply wrong.

jeff



Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]