Re: [dev] Re: [dmenu] [patch] add xft and fix possible memory leak in version 4.2.1

On 22 November 2010 15:26, Connor Lane Smith <cls_AT_lubutu.com> wrote:
> On 22 November 2010 12:01, Anselm R Garbe <garbeam_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>> I prefer to keep cleanup() even if it slows down the performance
>> (which I doubt will be noticeable) just for the sake of keeping the
>> symmetry that the code that allocates resources also deallocates them.
>> This might sound a bit pedantic and useless in case of dmenu, but I
>> prefer to be consistent here.
>
> I think that pedantic and useless code for the sake of consistency is
> more at home in GNU software than in Suckless. If code is provably a
> waste of time and space it should have no place in dmenu. If memory
> was allocated during use I would agree with you, as a leak would be
> possible. But it isn't.

Well no cleanup sounds rather like GNU to me tbh.

Anyways, if it was just about the items that are malloc'ed I would
probably agree. But it is also about cleaning up acquired X resources
properly. Not doing this somehow violates the style of X clients. If
an X window is created, I would destroy it on exit. Similarly I would
free pixmaps and ungrab the keyboard. It's just about good style, not
about saving every possible line of code. Complex cleanup is also an
indicator for a broken data structure. So if the cleanup can't be done
easily, then we should start from scratch. But this isn't the case in
dmenu.

Cheers,
Anselm
Received on Mon Nov 22 2010 - 16:18:20 CET