Hacker News Reader

Comment by esneider | Hacker News Reader

Hierarchical memory allocations are a great concept. But Samba's talloc is kind of bloated, with all the reference counting, destructors and stuff.

Here is a simple, 200-line version of just the hierarchical allocator: https://github.com/esneider/talloc

View on HN

Too simple ;)

  void * p;

  p = talloc(1, NULL);
  talloc_set_parent(p, p);
  tfree(p);

Yep, you can also do

  void *p;
  free(p);
  free(p);

Don't get me wrong, I get where you are going. But C philosophy is that libraries shouldn't do expensive checking to detect programmers' errors.

I'm not going anywhere. Double-free is a known pitfall. People watch for it and a lot of standard libraries have safeguards against it.

On the other hand tfree() hangs if a prior call to talloc_set_parent() is passed certain arguments. Just more ammunition to shoot one's own foot. (p, p) might be a degenerate case, but real code will create cyclic references. In such case blaming programmer is the least productive way to handle it.

Fair enough... I thought it would be more difficult/inefficient to check for cyclic hierarchies, but it wasn't.

Fixed! Thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com