Hands-On System Programming with Linux

Test case 13

Complex case—wrapper APIs. At times, one can be forgiven for thinking that all programmers are taught: after calling malloc (or calloc, realloc), call free. malloc and free go together! How hard can that be? Why are there are so many sneaky leakage bugs if this is the case?

A key reason that leakage defects occur and are hard to pinpoint is because some APIs—often, third-party library APIs—might internally perform dynamic memory allocation and expect the caller to free the memory. The API will (hopefully) document this important fact; but who (tongue in cheek) reads documentation?

That's really the crux of the issue in real-world software; it is complex and we work on large, complex projects. It is indeed easy to miss the fact ...