wxruby development - May 2007 - memory leaks

Have tracked down a fairly serious cause of memory leakage in wxRuby2. 
swig/fixdeleting.rb adds a hash mapping from pointer address to ruby 
VALUE in every director initialiser using GcMapPtrToValue.

The problem is that being a value in this global hash means that every 
Wx::Bitmap (for example, and others) are always marked in ruby''s GC
mark
phase, so they are never collected until shut down, even if they have 
fallen out of scope everywhere else.

I think the way to go is to dispense with fixdeleting altogether and 
define appropriate freefuncs for the different types of Wx classes 
(Windows, TopLevelWindows, Events, others) that reflect wxWidgets own 
memory management tactics. But this uncovers quite a few bugs that have 
so far been masked, so I think we should try after releasing 0.0.40

alex

I am all for getting rid of the ''special'' hacks in the build
process
but I think we should get out the wx2.8 version first then tackle the
memory leaks. I don''t have the time currently to work on fixing this
problem so it will be up to you, you will most likely be the one to do
the work anyway.

BTW Alex you are a machine, I don''t know where you find the time.

Sean

On 5/3/07, Alex Fenton <alex at pressure.to>
wrote:
> Have tracked down a fairly serious cause of memory leakage in wxRuby2.
> swig/fixdeleting.rb adds a hash mapping from pointer address to ruby
> VALUE in every director initialiser using GcMapPtrToValue.
>
> The problem is that being a value in this global hash means that every
> Wx::Bitmap (for example, and others) are always marked in ruby''s
GC mark
> phase, so they are never collected until shut down, even if they have
> fallen out of scope everywhere else.
>
> I think the way to go is to dispense with fixdeleting altogether and
> define appropriate freefuncs for the different types of Wx classes
> (Windows, TopLevelWindows, Events, others) that reflect wxWidgets own
> memory management tactics. But this uncovers quite a few bugs that have
> so far been masked, so I think we should try after releasing 0.0.40
>
> alex
>
>
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