Re: [gtk-list] Re: how can I trust glib when it has so many mem leaks?

[Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic srce hr>]

Michael Babcock <mbabcock@la.creatureshop.henson.com> writes:

> Arrrgh! I hate it when programs do this! X used to do this and it
> was extremely annoying. You had to restart your X server every so
> often because its memory usage would just grow and grow and never
> shrink. If you ran a graphically intense program that made X
> allocate a lot of pixmaps and your X server grew to 30 MB, then,
> that was it, it stays at 30 MB till the end of time (or until you
> restart the X server). I think Emacs used to do this as well.
> 
> Recent X and Emacs binaries have fixed this.

I don't know about X, but Emacs definitely still does it.  In Emacs,
it makes a lot of sense because it has a garbage collection system.
In glib, which is merely a library, it is much more questionable.

One separate problem that Emacs does address is the storage for text
in the buffers, which Emacs indeed tries to release back to the OS.
However, all the data stored in Lisp conses never gets released back,
AFAIK.