OpenEuphoria

Re: atexit

• Posted by Michael J. Sabal <m_sabal at yahoo.com> Feb 09, 2006
• 470 views

ChrisBurch2 wrote:
> But, I can't help remember reading somewhere that euphoria released all
> its memory allocations, and cleaned up itself, when it exited.
> 
> It is good practice to do this explicitly, but this (IMHO) dtracts from
> eu's simplicity - you don't have to if you don't want to. To demand that
> it be done, is to start to go down C's route of having to do everything
> yourself (been there, done that).
> 
> Chris

This is one of the things that drove me to Euphoria in the first place (nearly
ten years ago now, wow!).  I loved that Euphoria cleanly managed its own
memory.  But even with that, memory leaks are some of the hardest bugs to 
discover and fix.  I have yet to meet a MS product that didn't leak like a 
rusty bucket.  Even some of our most beloved open source projects like
Firefox are riddled with memory leaks.  By making a habit of freeing anything
that's allocated manually, even if Euphoria will take care of it later, is
just plain good programming.  And with shared libraries, there is no 
guarantee that the Euphoria interpreter is even aware that the memory was
allocated to be able to free it on exit.

Michael J. Sabal