我们都被教导必须释放每个已分配的指针。不过,我有点好奇不释放内存的真正代价。在一些明显的情况下,比如在循环内部或线程执行的一部分调用malloc()时,释放是非常重要的,这样就不会有内存泄漏。但是考虑下面两个例子:

首先,如果我有这样的代码:

int main()
{
    char *a = malloc(1024);
    /* Do some arbitrary stuff with 'a' (no alloc functions) */
    return 0;
}

真正的结果是什么?我的想法是进程死亡,然后堆空间也消失了,所以错过对free的调用没有什么坏处(然而,我确实认识到无论如何拥有它对于闭包、可维护性和良好实践的重要性)。我这样想对吗?

Second, let's say I have a program that acts a bit like a shell. Users can declare variables like aaa = 123 and those are stored in some dynamic data structure for later use. Clearly, it seems obvious that you'd use some solution that will calls some *alloc function (hashmap, linked list, something like that). For this kind of program, it doesn't make sense to ever free after calling malloc because these variables must be present at all times during the program's execution and there's no good way (that I can see) to implement this with statically allocated space. Is it bad design to have a bunch of memory that's allocated but only freed as part of the process ending? If so, what's the alternative?


当前回答

如果一个程序在退出前忘记释放几兆字节,操作系统将释放它们。但是如果你的程序一次运行几个星期,并且程序内部的循环忘记在每次迭代中释放几个字节,你将会有一个巨大的内存泄漏,它将耗尽你计算机中所有可用的内存,除非你定期重新启动它=>如果程序用于一个非常大的任务,即使很小的内存泄漏也可能是不好的,即使它最初并不是为它设计的。

其他回答

不释放变量并没有真正的危险,但是如果将一个内存块的指针分配给另一个内存块而不释放第一个块,第一个块将不再可访问,但仍然占用空间。这就是所谓的内存泄漏,如果您经常这样做,那么您的进程将开始消耗越来越多的内存,从其他进程占用系统资源。

如果进程是短期的,那么通常可以这样做,因为当进程完成时,所有分配的内存都会被操作系统回收,但我建议养成释放所有不再使用的内存的习惯。

我完全不同意那些说OP是正确的或没有伤害的人。

每个人都在谈论现代和/或传统的操作系统。

但是如果我在一个没有操作系统的环境中呢? 哪里什么都没有?

想象一下,现在您正在使用线程样式的中断并分配内存。 在C标准ISO/IEC:9899中,内存的寿命表示为:

7.20.3 Memory management functions 1 The order and contiguity of storage allocated by successive calls to the calloc, malloc, and realloc functions is unspecified. The pointer returned if the allocation succeeds is suitably aligned so that it may be assigned to a pointer to any type of object and then used to access such an object or an array of such objects in the space allocated (until the space is explicitly deallocated). The lifetime of an allocated object extends from the allocation until the deallocation.[...]

所以我们不能认为环境在为你做释放的工作。 否则,它将被添加到最后一句:“或直到程序终止。”

换句话说: 不释放内存不仅仅是不好的做法。它生成不可移植且不符合C的代码。 至少可以被视为“正确的”,如果有以下情况:[…]],由environment支持。

但如果你根本就没有操作系统,那就没有人在为你做这项工作了 (我知道通常在嵌入式系统中不会分配和重新分配内存, 但在某些情况下,你可能想这么做。)

在普通的C语言中(OP被标记) 这只会产生错误的和不可移植的代码。

为这个进程分配的所有内存将被OS标记为未使用,然后重用,因为内存分配是由用户空间函数完成的。

想象OS是一个上帝,而记忆是创造一个过程世界的材料,上帝用一些材料创造了一个世界(或者说OS保留了一些内存并在其中创造了一个过程)。无论这个世界上的生物做了什么,不属于这个世界的物质都不会受到影响。在这个世界过期后,OS神,可以回收分配给这个世界的材料。

现代操作系统在释放用户空间内存方面可能有不同的细节,但这必须是操作系统的基本职责。

It depends on the OS environment the program is running in, as others have already noted, and for long running processes, freeing memory and avoiding even very slow leaks is important always. But if the operating system deals with stuff, as Unix has done for example since probably forever, then you don't need to free memory, nor close files (the kernel closes all open file descriptors when a process exits.) If your program allocates a lot of memory, it may even be beneficial to exit without "hesitation". I find that when I quit Firefox, it spends several !minutes ! paging in gigabytes of memory in many processes. I guess this is due to having to call destructors on C++ objects. This is actually terrible. Some might argue, that this is necessary to save state consistently, but in my opinion, long-running interactive programs like browsers, editors and design programs, just to mention a few, should ensure that any state information, preferences, open windows/pages, documents etc is frequently written to permanent storage, to avoid loss of work in case of a crash. Then this state-saving can be performed again quickly when the user elects to quit, and when completed, the processes should just exit immediately.

你说得对,不会造成伤害,直接退出会更快

原因有很多:

All desktop and server environments simply release the entire memory space on exit(). They are unaware of program-internal data structures such as heaps. Almost all free() implementations do not ever return memory to the operating system anyway. More importantly, it's a waste of time when done right before exit(). At exit, memory pages and swap space are simply released. By contrast, a series of free() calls will burn CPU time and can result in disk paging operations, cache misses, and cache evictions.

关于未来代码重用的可能性,为毫无意义的操作的确定性辩护:这是一个考虑,但可以说这不是敏捷的方式。YAGNI !