[ale] OT: C not C++ Question

[Chuck Huber]

On Mon, Dec 30, 2002 at 09:12:08AM -0500, cfowler wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-12-30 at 09:00, Chuck Huber wrote:
> >
> > 
> > Chris,  How much more work are you going to put into being lazy?
> > 
> > Enjoy,
> >     - Chuck
> 
> Funny.  I just hate rewriting code over and over and over again. I will
> tell you this.

Yeah, that was a really neat, and clean piece of code you sent.  When
I said "lazy", I was referring to memory management - not to the effort
of writing java-like C functions.  The java-like effort is obviously well
worth the time and would be a really good candidate to release to open source.
With inside knowledge of your project, you've probably already reused this
enough to more than justify its development.

I recall a post you made earlier regarding what to do with the memory
allocated as an argument to a function call.  If memory serves me correct
it went something like:

    while (...)
    {
        ...
        XXX_doSomething(YYY_new(...));
    }

and your concern was that you lost a reference to the YYY object and
were thus unable to destroy it.  Try this on for size:

    while (...)
    {
        YYY *tempyyy;

        ...
        tempyyy = YYY_new(...);
        XXX_doSomething(tempyyy);
        YYY_destroy(tempyyy);
    }

I know, it's more bulky than the java counterpart.

here's something to ponder...  I wonder if you could write something
like a blow_args function that took care of this for you:

    blow_args(XXX_doSomething, YYY_new(...), NULL);

It would then invoke the XXX_doSomething with the args that follow, then
call a destroy function on each arg.  It would be assumed that each of
the arguments is a java-like object, and thus has a pointer to it's
own destroy function.

Another option would be to take a look at the garbage collector
someone mentioned in a later post.  Now that sounds promising.

Enjoy,
    - Chuck

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