[Xcb] lists, replies, and freeing

[Vincent Torri]

On Wed, 11 May 2005, Jamey Sharp wrote:

> On Wed, 2005-05-11 at 06:40 +0200, Vincent Torri wrote:
>> On Tue, 10 May 2005, Jamey Sharp wrote:
>>> On Tue, 2005-05-10 at 21:31 -0400, Jeremy Kolb wrote:
>>>> If you have a reply return a list and you free the reply does that free
>>>> the list is free as well or should that be freed later?
>>>
>>> All the memory for a reply, including any lists in that reply, is
>>> allocated in a single malloc call. So you must not free any lists from
>>> replies, and you should free the reply pointer returned by whatever
>>> XCB*Reply function you called.
>>
>> is that why there is always a "Length" method associated to each "Value"
>> one ?
>
> I find the question interesting because I don't understand how you got
> there from what I said... I think I would learn something if I
> understood that. :-)

Maybe I was not clear. For example:

XCBTIMECOORD *XCBGetMotionEventsEvents(XCBGetMotionEventsRep *R);
int XCBGetMotionEventsEventsLength(XCBGetMotionEventsRep *R);

the first function returns an array of timecoord, while the second returns 
the number of elements in this array. Am I wrong ?

>
> No, those are an attempt at providing consistency to XCB's users. In all
> cases the caller can find the length of a list by evaluating some
> expression composed of fields of the reply, but in a number of cases XCB
> needs to be able to evaluate those expressions internally anyway. So I
> chose to make them public so users don't have to figure out what the
> right expression is for a particular list.

it was what i wanted to say, I think

Vincent