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

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi;

On 22 November 2011 09:44, Tristan Van Berkom <tristanvb openismus com> wrote:
> Similarly the GMainLoop, by virtue of being a loop,
> should also push a pool onto the autorelease pool stack
> and pop it while dispatching GSources (and this is where
> you get the extra 'unref on mainloop hit' detail).

it's not strictly necessary to have a default behaviour, though.

we could have two distinct functions:

  /* schedules a idle source to release the resources when we re-enter
the main loop */
  void
  g_autorelease_pool_pop_in_idle (GAutoreleasePool*);

  /* releases the resources immediately */
  void
  g_autorelease_pool_pop (GAutoreleasePool*);

following the pattern in GIO. for MT applications we could even
provide a function to release resources within a specific GMainContext
as well, to release the resources in a specific thread instead of the
default main context.

the obvious issue is: how does this interact with languages that do
have a GC, and how does the API work to avoid making the life of
developers for high-level languages apps and/or bindings a nightmare.
if libraries start using this object for their internal allocations,
for instance, or start relying on it when using their API.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/