Re: GC leak?

I don't have an opinion, bang on Marcus's door. Which GC are you using? If it's Marcus's (I hope so, pretty clearly that's the Way of the Future), then internal GC problems of various shapes and sizes are quite credible (no offense to Marcus, just that AIUI inventing a reliable GC is an incredibly hard problem, and I don't understand his paper well enough -- ie, not at all -- to see a correctness proof :-).

However, I have a reason for singling out Xft. First, like most X11 code, the documentation about this stuff sucks (you're supposed to know The X11 Way by heart), and there are few checks to make sure that the callers know what they're doing. Second, I don't trust any of the people who did a lot of work on Xft (me, Aidan, Eric Knauel) to get GCPROs right, and we are seeing a lot more crashes that could be wild pointers (Thomas Mittelstaed's travails on AIX for example) recently. GCPRO problems could easily go back to 2002 and Ben's Great Mule Merge, as only recently have lots of users been switching to 21.5 for decent Unicode support. I do trust ben to get it 99.9% right, but I bet he touched 2000 GCPROs in that process. I'd be surprised if he left less than 1 GCPRO bug behind :-) (and I don't mean "too much" GCPRO, either).

#ifdef DEBUG_XEMACS it and it has my vote, no matter how cheesy. :-) Better yet, make it non-cheesy and always available. If valgrind still requires special compilation like it used to, add a 'valgrind feature and appropriate checks. Then how about a valgrind Make target that would do "make check" but with valgrind watching?