QuickLook and overriden new/delete operator

Question

Hi at all,
I need your !great! help. Currently I am on the way to write a QuickLook plugin.
To do that, I use a static lib in the project to get certain information of the file.
Everything works fine, except the QuickLook plugin crashs on exit. The new and delete operator are overriden by the external lib.
The problem is, it seems that OSX allocates some internal stuff with the
original new operator and deallocates it with the +new overriden+ delete
operator which occurs a crash.
Any ideas how to solve that? The overriden new operator is in its own namespace.
Each help is highly appreciated
Bye,
moepmoep

Answer 1

MoepMoep wrote:
No, the library is well tested and not buggy. It simply overrides the new/delete operator
and in some calls the delete operator gets some pointers where the corresponding new operator did
not allocated the memory.
That sounds like a bug to me.
Apple (or, rather, gcc) is free to do any clever things it wants inside its own new/delete operators. If some library wants to write their own, they don't have to emulate anything that Apple does. The old C malloc still works great. But if you have some pointer to memory that did not come from a valid malloc call, you better not call free on it.
Keep in mind that many open source projects are built and tested only on Linux. Linux is notorious for doing everything in its power to make bad code run. Then, people take this running and tested code and try it on MacOS X and it fails. "But it runs great on Linux!" they proclaim. That is true, but only because malloc never fails on Linux. If your programs runs out of memory on Linux, Linux will kill some other, random program. On MacOS X, malloc may fail and developers need to check for that.