Memory Leaking and Automatic Collection
I checked in a change to Makefile.in today that lets one disable the garbage collector more easily. I then tried out a few memory leak detection tools. First I tried ccmalloc. I couldn't even get this working, it just crashes, even with the sample program on the web site. Then I gave mpatrol a go. I'd heard good things about mpatrol. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to like dynamic loading of shared libraries and (for no good reason) we don't link to the loaders statically in Boomerang. So I gave up and installed valgrind. It still rocks. It not only told me how much memory we were leaking and where from, it also told me some use-before-define errors of which I wasn't aware. I checked in fixes. Next, I had a look at Boost's shared_ptr class. I'm hoping to figure out a way to easily add something like this to replace the garbage collector. Unfortunately, the use of smart pointers is anything but easy. You'd think that you could define something ...