]> On Thursday, December 11, 2003, at 03:36 PM, Richard Jones wrote: > I wrote an interface to allow OCaml to call Perl code and libraries. > This interface doesn't pay much attention to collecting memory > correctly. In particular when a Perl SV (scalar value) is allocated > and passed to us, it will have a Perl internal link count of, say, 1, > and we never decrement that link count, so Perl will never free it. [...] > I imagine that what I should do is to add a finalization function, so > that when 'rv' is garbage collected, I should decrement the Perl link > count, thus forcing Perl to free the associated SV. Yes, this is the canonical example of using finalized blocks. > Is this safe though? Can OCaml copy this object, and collect one of > them, thus causing the SV to be deallocated early? Do I need another > layer of indirection between 'rv' and the SV? Of course it is safe. It is guaranteed that each allocation of a finalized block corresponds to at most one call of its finalization function. Otherwise, finalization would be much less useful. -- Damien ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners