Re: dealloc vs dealloc(n)

[Simon Coulter <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 16/02/2008, at 3:30 PM, Mark S. Waterbury wrote:

> Personally, I never, ever deallocate dynamically allocated storage.
> Since the ILE heap is so large, we can usually afford to just keep on
> issuing alloc for more  and more storage. Eventually, at "end of job",
> the whole ILE heap gets cleaned up automatically.  So, this way, you
> never have these problems with "dangling" pointers overlaying other
> storage. (Also, those kinds of problems are usually very difficult to
> debug.)
>
> This approach also applies to all languages that can use dynamically
> allocated ILE heap storage (even OPM MI assembler).

Might be fine for a program that always runs in its own job, starts,  
does some work, and ends, but for anything that may run frequently in  
an interactive job or a long-running batch server type job this is  
just asking for trouble. Memory leaks abound in code with plenty of  
storage available and eventually they cause problems.

I'm fairly sure you know that but there are others who might consider  
this lazy way an acceptable one.

Pointers are like farm gates: if you open (allocate) it you should  
close (deallocate) it. If it's already open leave it open. With  
pointers however, there are some sloppy functions that return an  
allocated pointer and expect the caller to deallocate so it's more of  
a guideline than a rule but the point (hardeharhar) is obvious.


Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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