[Mono-devel-list] Re: [PATCH] Improper free of return-value string pointers from unmanaged calls

[Steven Brown]

Marcus wrote:

> Freeing the string pointers is the appropriate behavior for .NET 
> compatibility.

Could you give me a link to some docs that refer to that?  It's 
empirically untrue as far as I can tell, as I can repeatedly call a 
method that dynamically allocates the returned string like:

MEMEAT_API char *foo(void)
{
	static char *str = "Hello there";
	static int i = 0;
	char *newstr = (char *) malloc(strlen(str) + 1);
	strcpy(newstr, str);
	printf("%i: %s\n", i++, newstr);
	return newstr;
}

and if it was supposed to free the pointers, Microsoft's .NET 
implementation isn't, as the above bloats the process.  The alternative 
does not:

MEMEAT_API char *foo(void)
{
	static char *str = "Hello there";
	static int i = 0;
	//char *newstr = (char *) malloc(strlen(str) + 1);
	//strcpy(newstr, str);
	printf("%i: %s\n", i++, str);
	return str;
}

It doesn't make sense to free such a string pointer, as often string 
pointers will be coming from .rodata and such.