> Generally speaking, it is whoever mallocs memory that has the > responsibility for freeing it. If your app mallocs it, your app should free > it; if the library mallocs it, the library should free it. > > In some cases, the ownership of a bit of memory (or any other resource) > may be transferred; in those cases, the responsibility for deallocation is > transferred along with the ownership. > > But that does not happen without a clear statement in the interface / > documentation. A function that returns a pointer to some data in memory is > giving you just that, and no more: a pointer to some data in memory. Only > if the specification of the function explicitly states that the caller gets > ownership of the resource should your code assume it has any rights over it > whatsover. If the interface doesn't say so, then you should assume nothing > - not just that you can't free (...) it, but you should also assume that you > aren't allowed to overwrite the memory block or change its contents or do > anything other than examine and/or copy it.
OK, thank you. This seems clear. I've sent the patch for this problem upstream, and the corrected Cygwin package will be out shortly. Andrew. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
