MALLOC Wrappers Is Bad

I have found my old messages to wm-core@w.o mailing list. I have to admit that I still agree with most things I've said then. I still think that no library function should print something on the screen unless this is the main goal of the function. As the only exception to this rule I can accept some debugging output I can disable. I remember how much trouble was working with libxml2 which prints various warnings about malformed xml being parsed with no way to disable this. Exactly the same things I think about termination of applications within the library function. I prefer that these decisions should be left for application.

I thought about using Boehm garbage collector library. There's even some experimental code in WindowMaker to use it. It looks like a very appealing idea for a lisper like me. But garbage collectors are generally incompatible with tools like valgrind. And I want to use such tools, at least until I clean up the code. Also, using some garbage collecting library can possibly happen to be incompatible with some future changes like embedding extension language such as guile, which uses own garbage collector.

I decided to eliminate wmalloc, wmalloc0, wrealloc, and wfree functions. Checking return value everywhere malloc is used and reacting gracefully to that condition requires huge amount of work. It will take some time, and probably will be the cause of many other changes. I'll do it in a number of small steps.