[Development] Qt's Leak-on-exit policy

[Andreas Hartmetz]

On Wednesday 18 December 2013 09:34:37 Sorvig Morten wrote:
> On 18 Dec 2013, at 01:22, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com> wrote:
> > If it turns out that the failure to destroy is harmless, I'm not sure we
> > should do anything. If it's harmless, that means the extra work required
> > to
> > free the memory is wasted, since it has no benefit to anyone. Just wasted
> > CPU cycles.
> 
> An interesting trend on the Apple platforms is not having a clean app
> shutdown. The OS will terminate the process when the user indicates it’s no
> longer in use, for example by switching to another app or closing all the
> application windows.
> 
> This suggests two levels of support from Qt:
> 
> 1) Support a clean shutdown for applications and/or operating systems that
> require this. We go the extra mile to make sure Qt works well with leak
> detecting tools.
> 
> 2) Support “process terminate” style shutdown for applications that require
> a fast shutdown. This shutdown could be initiated by the OS or by the
> application. The requirements for this lie in the area of the application
> not doing much processing on shutdown (auto-saving settings immediately for
> example), and Qt protecting itself from termination during critical
> operations such as writing QSettings to disk or having a background file
> transfer in progress.
> 
Hello.
This is not supposed to be a serious contribution to the discussion.
This is about an unworkable but fun idea.

2) reminds me of a crazy idea I've had once... freeing memory (not
object destruction!) at application exit really serves no other purpose
than making leak checkers happy. Not saying that this isn't an
important goal, btw. So shutdown could be accelerated by putting
free() into a special shutdown mode that just immediately returns.
Of course there would be a conditional branch somewhere, unless you
modified the GOT entry for free() or something. That would add a
runtime overhead, which is worse than slightly slower shutdown.

I don't even know how much time is spent in free() at shutdown, and
faster shutdown isn't a very important goal anyway.
Instantaneous shutdown (see 2)) seems more useful in practice.