Re: [Vala] malloc/free CCode attributes

[Arc Riley <arcriley ubuntu com>]

I may not be understanding you correctly, but an interface is a gobject mechanic.  This is intended as a quick and simple mechanism for non-gobject library bindings.

Free shouldn't actually be needed, since that's handled by the specified unref_function, but something as simple as:

  [Compact]
    [CCode
(lower_case_cprefix = "PyObject_",
           
ref_function = "Py_IncRef",
           
ref_function_void = true,
           
unref_function = "Py_DecRef",
            new_function = "PyObject_Malloc")]
    public class
Object {

Like ref_function and unref_function, it's just a drop-in replacement for the memory allocation function Vala would otherwise use which doesn't work with some bindings as they use their own internal memory management.

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 4:03 AM, Sam Liddicott <sam liddicott com> wrote:

I've given this a lot of thought.

Here's some ideas:

A memory management interface which implements these. A class implements the interface with it's own specific management.

This would be better done by late binding, the microsoft way, where the object supports IInterface so it can be queried for a complete memory management interface.

As this isn't likely to be magically compatible with what we have now; I have another solution; based on a tree of memory allocation pools.

Any allocation of memory (or super allocation) is registered with the memory pool library. It is then possible to call find_allocation(void* ptr) and be returned the management interface for that pointer.

It may be easier if a library will mmap memory it allocates, it become a matter of checking which range of mmap'd memory the pointer lies between.

Thus it will be easy to get the memory management interface associated with a pointer.

Sam