[correnos]

Of the three compilers I've worked on in-depth, only one of them had a "normal" memory management scheme.

One of them was unburdened by any thought of freeing stuff, and relied entirely on the application exiting for cleanup. This was very convenient to work with, and never ended up posing an issue.

Another used a series of allocation arenas, where certain arenas would be cleared at certain points in the compiler pipeline. This made for both speedy alloc/freeing and avoided leaks, since you weren't at risk of "forgetting" a data structure. It was also a major headache to keep track of exactly what the longest lifetime of a long-lived datastructure might be, and to pick an arena that won't be cleared in the meantime. Unfortunately the programs compiled with this compiler were large enough that we certainly couldn't have gotten away with just leaking memory; we sometimes OOMed as-is!

The third used standard C++ memory management. This compiler was quite simple, and the vast majority of its data used stack-based lifetimes. For a more complex compiler this would've become a headache.

I think that all of these compilers chose the correct allocation strategy for what they were doing. "Good practices" aren't as universal as we might like to believe, they depend entirely on the context in which a tool is designed to operate. And yes, we can guard to some extent against that context changing, but for the most part that's why we keep getting paid.

[pdimitar]

Judging by the downvotes I am getting (with zero explanation as to why), I'd say that many misunderstood the "good practices" part and took offence, as if I said there's only one good practice.

I was taught -- including at the start of my career when I used exclusively C/C++ (about 18.5y ago) -- to take care of all resources I was using and not rely on runtimes.

I understand and appreciate different usages but to me doing a proper cleanup was the sane default for most programmers. And that's all what I was saying.

Obviously, as one digs deeper in a specialised area where more and more efficiency is demanded then they have to reach for tools that most of us wouldn't normally. That's quite normal and was always interesting for me to read about.

[grayclhn]

I didn't downovte, but asides like, "sounds awful" and "nasty" definitely read as judgemental. Your other comments on this thread make you seem much more open minded than this one did.