[webkit-dev] strdup in WebKit

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Jan 20, 2010, at 2:07 AM, KwangYul Seo wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> WebKit does not use malloc/free directly in favor of fastMalloc/fastFree. The only exception to this rule is strdup() which returns a memory that must be freed by free. Why don't we add fastStrDup which allocates a memory with fastMalloc? The memory returned by fastStrDup can be freed by fastFree.

Sounds like a reasonable plan in general. It's possible that in some of the cases you cie below, strdup is being used to pass malloc-allocated memory to a library that expects a string allocated with system malloc, which it will proceed to free itself. I'm not sure if it's really true in any of these cases, but it's something to check.

I suggest filing a bug and submitting a patch for this.

Cheers,
Maciej


> 
> The following source files in WebCore contains strdup calls.
> 
> dom/XMLTokenizerLibxml2.cpp
> plugins/PluginStream.cpp
> platform/network/ResourceHandleInternal.h
> platform/network/curl/ResourceHandleManager.cpp
> platform/network/curl/ResourceHandleCurl.cpp
> xml/XSLTProcessorLibxslt.cpp
> bindings/v8/npruntime.cpp
> bindings/v8/V8NPUtils.cpp
> bridge/IdentifierRep.h
> bridge/jni/jni_runtime.cpp
> bridge/jni/jsc/JavaClassJSC.cpp
> bridge/npruntime.cpp
> bridge/testbindings.cpp
> 
> strdup/free pairs can be safely replaced with fastStrDup/fastFree in most cases.  However, bridge and bindings can be an exception because some APIs must return malloc() allocated memory that can be freed with free().
> 
> I am asking this because strdup (POSIX function) is not available in RVCT. If this is not possible for some reasons, adding strdup to StringExtras.h for RVCT can be a good solution too. How does the Symbian QT port solve this problem?
> 
> Regards,
> Kwang Yul Seo
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> webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org
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