Re: Turning off the slice allocator

[Tim Janik <timj gtk org>]

[resending, because my initial email seems to got lost somehow]

On Fri, 20 Jan 2006, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> Federico asked for this earlier, so I sat down and wrote a very
> quick patch. It doesn't make everything in SliceConfig available via G_DEBUG,
> just the always_malloc flag for now. Thats probably enough for most
> people who want to turn off the slice allocator to debug memory overruns.
>
> With the patch, you can do G_DEBUG=always_malloc foobar
> to have foobar run without slice allocator. The patch currently
> overrides a value set by g_slice_set_config().
>
> Tim, do you think this is good enough ?

hmmm, no. or better, it's not exactly what _i_ had in mind for gslice ;)

i'm currently working on a dedicated G_SLICE variable that can support
different checking/debugging modes, similar to MALLOC_CHECK_ as documented
in glibc's malloc(3).

what i think would be great is if we reworked your patch to support
G_DEBUG=gc-friendly which sets a glib variable glib_mem_gc_friendly to
TRUE.
then, all the #ifdef ENABLE_GC_FRIENDLY statements in glib can be changed to
if (glib_mem_gc_friendly), to enable memory debugging/profiling without
recompilation of glib (and for stock distribution binary packages).

> Matthias

---
ciaoTJ