Freeing memory from C

[John Colvin]

On Tuesday, 3 December 2013 at 13:05:20 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> On 12/3/2013 9:31 PM, John Colvin wrote:
>>
>> You should be fine to free in that way as long as you haven't 
>> done
>> anything crazy like separately static linking libc.
>>
>
> I wouldn't advise this in the general case. When you have 
> complete end-to-end control, sure. But if, for example, you're 
> using a dynamic binding to load a shared library, all bets are 
> off. Most likely on Linux and Mac you'll be fine. But on 
> Windows, the shared lib could have been compiled with DMC, GCC, 
> MSVC, or who knows what else.

Fair point.

What I should have said is:

This is fine as long as you know you that both the C code and D 
code will be using the same so/dll/dylib C runtime.

It's worth noting that the situation is not specific to D: it's 
exactly the same as freeing memory in C that you got from a 
library. If they are using different runtimes, or even different 
instances of the same runtime, all bets are off. At best, your 
memory won't get freed, at worst it will cause corruption.