[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 27980] Give an ability to WebKit to free statically allocated pointers before quit

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27980





--- Comment #39 from Carol Szabo <carol.szabo at nokia.com>  2009-10-19 13:04:39 PDT ---
I believe that the value of being able to clean up static pointers goes well
beyond reporting memory leaks.
There are operating systems that run on embedded devices that use WebKit that
run all applications in one process space. They unload the WebKit library, but
any unfreed memory is leaked until the device is reset. On these devices
snapshots of WebKit have been customized to free these pointers. It would be
nice to have this code merged to the trunk.
There are applications that host various WebKit based WebWidgets that are
created and destroyed without the application quitting. For this class of
applications deleting the static pointers on library unload is important.
Next, there is the case described in an earlier comment of resetting the state
of WebKit.
Also, I believe that the proposal suggested earlier by somebody to run all
destructors before actually freeing the static allocations should take care of
circular references and delete order despite the fact that in a well designed
class architecture delete order of global objects should be irrelevant.
I am not saying that the default Mac build or even any platform's default build
should be affected in any way by these changes, but one should have the option
to make a build that supports a clean uninitialization.

Whenever something is built without provisions for clean tearing down sooner or
later problems will appear (think nuclear plants and nuclear waste).

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