Am 24.10.2013 05:39, schrieb Lex Trotman:
PS On the recycling of doc structures and doc->is_valid, this does have the advantage (for a structure where miscellaneous pointers to the structure are going to exist in Geany and plugins) that doc pointers will always point to a geanydocument struct. So the is_valid test is always right. If the memory was returned and re-cycled into some other struct, the old doc pointers could point to anything, and could just as easily appear a valid document. So its safer than the alternative, but the requirement to check is_valid really does need more visibility since its an unusual idiom.
The recycling & is_valid thing is completely bogus. It is wastes memory unnecessarily.
The is_valid thing is giving false security. Because a doc becomes valid again after it was recycled you cannot be sure that the document is still the same. Yet DOC_VALID() gives a false positive here if code missed the document-swap behind the scenes. So basically code that cares about GeanyDocument cannot rely on DOC_VALID() anyway.
The _only_ way to make sure things are alright is to cleanup per-document stuff in the "document-close" signal handler. If you don't connect to this signal your per-document code is broken, regardless of doc->is_valid. Even worse, this brokenness is hidden by valid doc pointers, whereas it would otherwise crash and suggest debugging the problem properly. The right way is to NULL'ify any cached document pointer in the signal-handler which makes recycling pointers unnecessary.
Also, recycling the pointers is only possible because the document array never shrinks. So if you had opened a large number of documents and close many of them you waste a lot of memory.
I vote for removing this idiom and transition the documents array to a GList which gives other nice advantages.
Best regards.