Re: Memory leaks in cairo bindings

[Barry Scott <barry scott onelan co uk>]

On Thu 18 Dec 2014 15:15:10 Barry Scott wrote:
> I am trying to track down a problem with leaking cairo_t context structs
> when using cairo from python. I running under an up to date fedora 20
> system. (I suspect that other structs are leaking as well, but I have not
> deep dived them yet).
>
> The attached example program can be run under valgrind to show the leak.
> The program takes a repeat count that you can use to tell the leak from the
> startup overhead.
>
>       python gdk-cairo-leak.py 10
>
> I think the bug is in the reference counting of the cairo_t struct.
> After creation the ref_count is 2 that that means that it will never be
> freed as the python object will be deleted causing cairo_destroy to be
> called that will take the ref count down to 1 but not 0 required to free
> the storage.
>
> Is there a mecahnism to mark the cairo_create and not needing an extra
> cairo_reference call?

Have look further I think I have a clue about the bug.

Why is pycairo_dealloc being used to release an object created and wrapped by 
GI using the box mechanism?

The semantics of pycairo and pygi cannot be mixed right?

Barry