🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1410023@hpcvca.CV.HP.COM> charles@hpcvca.CV.HP.COM (Charles Brown) writes:
> >> Rubbish. Every AmigaOS program has to have a substantial amount of code
> >> devoted to resource tracking... a job better assigned to the O/S. If you
> >> don't want to call that "coding around" the problems, then you're
> >> just playing games with words.
> 
> I try to write my programs in standard C so that they are portable
> between Unix and Amiga.  I told a friend of mine (who doesn't own an
> Amiga but who knows a great deal about Unix) that I planned to change
> my programming style to explicitely free all memory that I had
> malloced.  He said that under Unix that was a bad idea because the OS
> can free the memory much faster than my explicit calls.

To some extent this may be true, especially if it's a simple case of malloc
whatever you use once and then run with it.  If you malloc stuff on an
ongoing basis or have a program that runs for an arbitrary length of time,
then even in a "free on termination" environment, you should be tracking
and freeing memory.  The alternative is known as "memory leaks".

In most cases, the amount of code/time to free allocated memory should
be quite trivial.  If it bothers your efficiency experts, then #ifdef
the code...

-- 
George Robbins - now working for,	uucp: {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr
but no way officially representing	arpa: cbmvax!grr@uunet.uu.net
Commodore, Engineering Department	fone: 215-431-9255 (only by moonlite)