Martin Sandve Alnæs wrote:
> 2008/6/20 Garth N. Wells <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>>
>> Dag Lindbo wrote:
>>> Hello!
>>>
>>> I attach a script that runs Valgrind (memcheck) on all C++ demos (based
>>> on the one that just runs all demos). My suggestion is that this be
>>> included in the testing procedure.
>>>
>>> At present (on my machine) 17 of 31 demos result in a memory leak (!)
>>> None of the demos produce a memory error.
>>>
>>> Note that most, but not all, leaks are due to XML parsing. Are these
>>> really leaks? It is impossible for vg to understand memory pools and
>>> other exotic memory management that are not explicitly freed. Glib does
>>> this in the GTS interface. Maybe libxml2 does something similar. In that
>>> case, I can easily provide a suppression for xml2.
>>>
>> I took a look and fixed at least one leak, but a few others don't look
>> like leaks to me. Part of the problem is that I think we're using
>> pointers is some classes where std::vector would be more appropriate,
>> particularly in the mesh and dof map classes, which is a source of
>> potential leaks and makes ownership unclear.
>>
>> Is there a reason that we use pointers for various arrays in the mesh
>> classes rather than std::vector?
> 
> I believe you cannot get the pointer to std::vector content?
> (At least not safely and portable?)
>

In many cases, this isn't needed. Pointers have been used for privare 
arrays which are (re)sized at runtime and aren't passed around, e.g.

   uint* connections

in MeshConnectivity.

> An alternative may be to use shared_ptr<real>,
> if several classes are to use the same memory.
> 
> The main backsides are more template syntax
> and no python support. The latest swig is supposed
> to have support for using shared_ptr with python.
> 
> If you want to try shared_ptr for arrays, you need to
> define an array deleter, I can dig up the code
> if anyone's interested.
> 

Smart pointers could be useful in some cases. Boost also provides some 
elaborate smart pointers.

Garth
_______________________________________________
DOLFIN-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.fenics.org/mailman/listinfo/dolfin-dev

Reply via email to