[Plib-devel] Memory leak in AC loader

[Durk T. <d.t...@xs...>]

Dear plib developers,

Recently, I've been trying to hunt down memory leaks in FlightGear, and ran it 
through valgrind. One of the results coming out of valgrind is that there 
appears to be a memory leak in plib's AC3d Model loader. 

In ssgLoadAC.cxx, there is a static variable mlist, which is a static array of 
pointers to _ssgMaterial objects:

on line 295 of this file, a new ssgMaterial object is created for each 
material:

 mlist [ num_materials ] = new _ssgMaterial ;

It looks like these objects are never deleted, so my proposed solution is to 
delete these objects at the end of the 
ssgEntity *ssgLoadAC ( const char *fname, const ssgLoaderOptions* options )

function, like this.

  for (int i = 0; i < num_materials; i++)
    {
      delete mlist[i];
    }


I have tested this solution for about two weeks in my local copy of plib, 
using FlightGear. My copy of FlightGear handles a high load of AI driven 
aircraft, which includes, in turn, a high load of ac3d model loading and 
unloading and the code appears to run without any sign of trouble.

I haven't prepared an official patch yet, as I'm not sure what the current 
procedure for submitting plib patches is. I'd be perfectly happy to commit 
the patch myself (I am registered under the developer name durktalsma on 
sourceforge).

Cheers,
Durk