From: "Steve Howe" <howe@carcass.dhs.org>
Subject: Must implement PQnotifyFree()
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 02:34:57 -0200
Organization: ACME
Lines: 38
Message-ID: <93m1gm$8vd$1@news.tht.net>
To: pgsql-interfaces@postgresql.org

Hi folks,


        I'm co-developer of Delphi and Borland C++ Builder Zeos library
(http://www.zeos.dn.ua) by Sergey Seroukhov which includes support for
PostgreSQL. In fact, I'm dedicated Zeos PostgreSQL developer.
        We've run into a problem that we can't properly free the PPGnotify
handle returned by PQnotifies() - simply because Delphi does NOT include
free() routine (it does have it's own memory management routines of course).
We could assume MSVC's malloc() is used and import free() from it, like
this:
        procedure free(P: Pointer); cdecl; external 'msvcrt.dll'; // (which
is the Delphi/Pascal equivalent of C's free())

- but that would be a crude hack and would probably not work in platforms
other then windows (Kylix, Delphi's encarnation on Linux, is almost ready as
most of you should know) or libpq.dll compiled with other C compilers then
then currently being used.
        That's why we believe a PQnotifyFree() or similar function should be
implemented since not everybody using libpq.dll is also using MSVC compiler.
That could also lead to problems in other platforms using compilers with
different allocation schemes.
        Of course it is trivial to implement such a function and this should
be no trouble.

        Could you please consider it ? Of course nobody wants memory
corruption in their applications and we don't like having to let those
records allocated, but we can't currently do much about it.
        Thanks.


Best Regards,
Steve Howe
Capella Development Group.