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I will just point out that there is a tradeoff here; now all memory tracing tools (like valgrind) are going to find a memory leak for all
rclcpp
programs. I'm not sure that is enough of a problem to block putting this in, but it is a downside.Is there any place we could safely
delete
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I believe that memory debuggers are aware of this pattern. They actually won't report this as a memory leak because there's always a valid reference to it during execution until final termination due to the statically allocated reference. As such for all times during the program's execution this memory is reachable.
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There's no good time to delete it, and though I don't love it either, it is the recommended solution in the google c++ style guide. 🤷
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The alternative would be to ensure this class is trivially destructible which isn't possible given that it needs to store things like the
rclcpp::Logger
which itself stores a string, astd::thread
, etc... So I think this is the best solution unfortunately.I will point out it is a recommended style, not a correctness thing. What's there today is valid and (as far as we can see) correct code, but the issue is if a bug works its way in, this pattern (non-trivial static objects) makes diagnosing harder, hence the recommendation. So I think it's a valid thing to change.