No, you can't get Perl to use buffers allocated by other libraries (I don't think it is OK in any cases -- and I've tried and been impressed with how hard Perl makes it to even use magic to get such working). But I wasn't doing that. I was having Perl allocate the buffer and having the C routine use it.

If you are worried about the C routine (or some other routine from that library) reallocating or free()ing the buffer passed to it, then you'll have problems in those cases even with your solution. To avoid that you'd have to copy the data out of the Perl buffer before calling subsequent routines (something that isn't even shown to be happening). If the C routine in question reallocated or freed the buffer, then the interface to the C routine would simply be broken and there would be no safe way to use it. So I don't see any problem with my approach.

I despise XS code that is complex. If I wanted to go to the point of checking wantarray etc. then I'd have a Perl subroutine wrapper for the XS code and do such interface massaging there rather than in the XS code. (:

                - tye

In reply to Re^4: Perl XS: garbage-collecting my malloc'd buffer (perlish?) by tye
in thread Perl XS: garbage-collecting my malloc'd buffer by edan

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.