Il giorno Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:13:32 +0100 Chris Vine <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> ha scritto: > On Fri, 17 Jun 2011 10:43:24 +0200 > Tadej Borovšak <tadeboro@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Another indicator that returned value should be freed is lack of const > > modifier on return value. > > > > If API docs state: > > > > const char * get_something () -> do not free result > > char * get_another_thing () -> free result > > This is certainly not true of the C language: in the C language, naming > a variable as const has no effect on whether its storage may or may not > be freed where it happens to be allocated on the heap, and the same is > true of C++ (the delete expression may happily to applied to pointers to > const, or indeed const pointers to const). If you have to free a const pointer you need to explicitely cast it to non-const to avoid a warning (in gcc at least). This seems to me a clear indicator the returned value should not be freed. > Furthermore, I do not believe it to be a convention adopted by GTK+/glib > either. Apart from the case of C strings, I believe GTK+ eschews any > use of the const keyword in order to avoid const poisoning. I am happy > to be proved wrong, but I cannot off the top of my head recall any case, > other than a C string, where an object is returned in GTK+ by pointer > to const. I had this same issue on my own project: you cannot use const on any referenced type because this prevents you from further referencing/dereferencing the returned instance. I suppose GTK+ has the same problem and does not use const more because of a lack of syntactic sugar. Ciao. -- Nicola _______________________________________________ gtk-list mailing list gtk-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-list
