Re^2: perlembed: mortalize an AV, get "Attempt to free unreferenced scalar" - don't mortalize, leaks memory

[gellyfish]

You will find these things in the perl source code. newAV() is defined in av.c. The struct av is defined in sv.h and the typedef struct av AV; is in perl.h

/J\

[Moron]

I have now found a copy of the source of av.c at sourceforge updated version and my first second impression is that an explicit call to av_clear Perl_av_clear is required to free the memory.

[gellyfish]

You probably actually wanted a more recent copy of the source. av_clear doesn't free the memory allocated to the array nor does it free the SVs that form its elements. It simply truncates the array.

/J\

[demerphq]

nor does it free the SVs that form its elements

moron is partially correct, it does free the SV's that form its elements. Although indirectly via refcount decrement. Thats what the follow code does:

while (index) {
    SV * const sv = ary[--index];
    /* undef the slot before freeing the value, because a
     * destructor might try to modify this array */
    ary[index] = &PL_sv_undef;
    SvREFCNT_dec(sv);
}

[Moron]

Amended accordingly (studying the version you cite av_clear appears to have been renamed to Perl_av_clear and the new av_clear has another purpose).