Re: memory leakages with Ada?

["Steve Doiel" <nospam_steved94@attbi.com>]

"Calvin Ow" <calvow@cyberway.com.sg> wrote in message
news:3c90af1e@news.starhub.net.sg...
> Hi,
> Has Ada got any memory leakage problems like that of C?
> Especially with the use of Pragma calls to C?
>

I'll assume you read the other replies to your post.

I would like to add that there are many cases in Ada where you don't need to
use dynamic allocation when you would have to use dynamic allocation in C.

For example, if you want to read a block of data that is preceded by a count
that gives the amount of data, in Ada the code would be something like:

  nbBytes := GetNbBytes( dataSource );
  declare
    dataBuffer : ByteBuffer( 1 .. nbBytes );
  begin
     GetData( dataBuffer );
  end;

Where in C the code would look something like:

  nbBytes = GetNbBytes( dataSource );
  dataPtr = (char *)calloc( nbBytes );
  GetData( dataPtr );
  free( dataPtr );

Disclaimer: I didn't compile either of the above code snippets above, and I
seldom release memory I dynamically allocate in C (I usually allocate once
and re-use for the life of the program for real-time systems), but you get
the idea.

With regard to the Pragma calls to C, in some cases you can use a buffer
declared on the stack instead of dynamically allocating for that case as
well, but when you can't I don't think you'll find Ada to be less
succeptable to leaks.

SteveD