A.1.10 Allocating Local Memory in Oct-Files

Allocating memory within an oct-file might seem easy, as the C++ new/delete operators can be used. However, in that case great care must be taken to avoid memory leaks. The preferred manner in which to allocate memory for use locally is to use the OCTAVE_LOCAL_BUFFER macro. An example of its use is

OCTAVE_LOCAL_BUFFER (double, tmp, len)

that returns a pointer tmp of type double * of length len.

In this case, Octave itself will worry about reference counting and variable scope and will properly free memory without programmer intervention.

© 1996–2020 John W. Eaton
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions.
https://octave.org/doc/v6.3.0/Allocating-Local-Memory-in-Oct_002dFiles.html