Anybody out there familiar with perlembed? I have playing with embedded perl in my C program and I am having a hard time to fix the memory leak problem.

I have the following piece of C test code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>

#include <EXTERN.h>
#include <perl.h>

EXTERN_C void xs_init (pTHXo);
EXTERN_C void boot_DynaLoader (pTHXo_ CV* cv);

EXTERN_C void
xs_init(pTHXo)
{
    char *file = __FILE__;
    dXSUB_SYS;

    /* DynaLoader is a special case */
    newXS("DynaLoader::boot_DynaLoader", boot_DynaLoader, file);
}

int
main (int argc, char **argv)
{
    PerlInterpreter *perl = NULL;
    int count = 0;
    
//    PL_perl_destruct_level = 1;

    fprintf(stdout, "Press Enter to start, Ctl-D to quit ...");
    while (getchar() != EOF) {
        fprintf(stderr, "********COUNT = %d, DESTRUCT LEVEL(0) = %d\n"
+, ++count, PL_perl_destruct_level);
        
        perl = perl_alloc();
        perl_construct(perl);
        
        perl_parse(perl, xs_init, argc, argv, NULL);
        perl_run(perl);
        
        PL_perl_destruct_level = 1;
        perl_destruct(perl);
        perl_free(perl);
        perl = NULL;
        
        fprintf(stdout, "Press Enter to continue, Ctl-D to quit ...");
+        
    }
    return 0;
}
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And I compile it like this:

gcc -o postv postversion.c `perl -MExtUtils::Embed -e ccopts -e ldopts`

My testing Perl script is very simple:

my $string = "HELLO WORLD\n";
print $string;
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What the program does is it will take in a Perl script file name and then stuck in a loop running the Perl script in C program. In every loop, a new interpreter will be allocated at the beginning and destroyed at the end.

I read in the perlembed manpage that if you set PL_perl_destruct_level to 1, the Perl interpreter will go away cleanly. However, this value seems to be reset everytime perl_construct() is being called, so I think the right place to set it is before the perl_destruct() is called and I tested that out and it seems correct.

I am running this happily with 5.6.0, but today I upgraded my Perl to 5.6.1 and if I run the same piece of code, the second time you construct the Perl interpreter, it will crash and a core dump is being generated. Then I tried to compile Perl with -Dusemultiplicty on, and it's even worse, it will crash as soon as the first interpreter is constructed.

Another problem I have having is that if in my testing Perl script, I am using some module, like :

my $string = "HELLO WORLD\n";
print $string;

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper($string);
[download]

Even if I set PL_perl_destruct_level to 1, there will be huge memory leak. Any clue? How can I fix this problem? Actually this is the reason I upgrade to 5.6.1, I was trying to see if the latest code is better but turns out to be even worse.

So anyone out there has any clue on how to fix them? I want to have a C program that will occasionaly create a Perl interpreter and execute some script, go away cleanly and I wrote that test code to test out the embedded module.

Thanks a lot,

Jerry