[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Split patch (was Re: [RFC PATCH] init_techs)

[Raimar Falke <hawk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2001 at 12:00:07AM -0400, Ross W. Wetmore wrote:
> I like your statement of what you claim to be agreeing to followed
> by what you actually want to do in practice.
> 
> Why on earth would you handle the same buffer contents 3 times with
> all those allocation and free calls when you could do it once and
> let the caller deal with at most one extra copy depending on whether
> the original buffer or the results needed to be preserved.
> 
> But most of the time I would expect that no extra copies were required
> in the caller algorithms.
> 

> split should treat the buffer it was handed as working memory, return
> pointers into the parsed string elements, and let the caller deal with
> ALL memory issues.

Ok since there is so much resistance: we implement the strdup/free in
split if it turns out that every caller of split will copy the string
because it is needed later. Ok?

> >   {
> >      char *token;
> >      ....
> >      mystrlcpy(items[i],token,max_item_len);

> More unnecessary garbage, this one usually generates tons of memory leaks
> from absent minded programmers, or those that can't tell 5 levels up
> who allocated or should deallocate this. Especially bad for 1st or 2nd
> generation maintainers who never really wrote or dealt with this in the
> first place. VERY bad programming practice to put such things in utility
> routines.

You know what strlcpy is? It is just the safe version of strcpy. There
are no memory leaks here. The caller calls split like:

  char *string;
  char items[MAX_ITEMS][MAX_ITEM_LEN];

  split(...);

There just are no memory leaks possible.

        Raimar

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