Hey Ron,
nice to see you still reading the list!
Am 03.01.2012 01:10 schrieb ron minnich:
Do leaks really matter in this kind of program? Sure, you're going to leak; how much? Sometimes with this type of code you let it leak, and it ends up simpler otherwise. How much leakage are we talking about here?
I'd say a few dozen bytes are leaking, and this is only an issue if some flashrom GUI using libflashrom calls programmer_init and programmer_shutdown a few thousand times.
I only ask because I was talking to someone a year ago who did not realize that the OS reclaimed all the storage a program leaked when the program exited :-) The poor guy was getting tangled up in knots over a 4k leak which in the long run really was of not importance ...
Ouch, not knowing about OS reclaim can indeed lead to painful programming.
My worries about leaks are mostly about repeated libflashrom uses. You're absolutely right that for a normal flashrom CLI invocation, one-time leaks (no continuous leakage during one flashing operation) don't matter at all.
Regards, Carl-Daniel