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Date:      Fri, 7 Aug 1998 10:12:48 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Archie Cobbs <archie@whistle.com>
To:        wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman)
Cc:        archie@whistle.com, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG, bde@zeta.org.au, wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu, dg@root.com
Subject:   Re: memory leaks in libc
Message-ID:  <199808071712.KAA29716@bubba.whistle.com>
In-Reply-To: <199808070332.XAA17093@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> from Garrett Wollman at "Aug 6, 98 11:32:21 pm"

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Garrett Wollman writes:
> >> malloc() is simple enough. It would solve the problem for programs
> >> than need it (a real world example of which exists at Whistle).
> 
> > OK, just to prove I'm not lazy... try this.
> 
> Now having gone to that effort, you can just add it to your program
> that needs it, and we don't have to bear the kluge in the C library.

I just don't understand where you're coming from. There is a clear
bug in the standard library, we agree on this right? You are saying
that it's not worth fixing, because...

- The cost is too high? I disagree, it's easy to fix and I've done
  it for you. The space increase is negligible, and the time increase
  is negligible, unless your program does a lot of environment operations,
  in which case you already have a bigger problem: a built-in memory leak!

- Because no program you've ever written suffers from the bug? Others
  have encountered it in real programs.

- It's a kludge? The kludge nature of this whole problem is already
  inherited from the "environ" variable semantics. There's nothing
  kludgey about the bug fix, other than that it takes one kludge
  to undo the negative effects (memory leak) of an existing kludge.

> I believe that any program which suffers serious harm from the memory
> leak probably needs to use a different environment-access model.

Yes, until we fix the bug. Then they don't anymore, that's the whole point.

-Archie

___________________________________________________________________________
Archie Cobbs   *   Whistle Communications, Inc.  *   http://www.whistle.com

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