Re: General GTK Question : When to Free, when to unref, etc.

[Joe Zacky <jzacky comcast net>]

Hubert Sokolowski wrote:

> On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 21:53:04 -0500
> Setzer- <setzer sm-soft org> wrote:
>  
>
> > Likely, when should source pointers be freed, with functions like 
> > gtk_list_store_set, g_locale_to_utf8, etc.
> > It isn't always clear what is being done with the stuff.
> >
> > I've also been told to use ' g_object_unref ', yet I've never heard of
> >
> > it in the tutorials, or anywhere else.
> > Is it important to use it? In which cases?
> >    
> this should be written in the reference when to use g_object_unref.
>
>
>  
There is an excellent explanation of reference counting in Tim-Philipp 
Müller's Tree View Tutorial:
   
http://scentric.net/tutorial/sec-treeview.html#sec-treeview-connect-model-refcounting

Here's a partial quote from that page:

'Reference counting' means that an object has a counter that can be 
increased or decreased (ref-ed and unref-ed). If the counter is unref-ed 
to 0, the object is automatically destroyed. This is useful, because 
other objects or application programmers only have to think about 
whether they themselves are still using that object or not, without 
knowing anything about others also using it. The object is simply 
automatically destroyed when no one is using it any more.

Joe Zacky