How to Free Memory of A Structure with Pointers to another Structure

Question

I have two structures

struct SimpleXY
{
    double x;
    double y;

};

    struct SimpleXyLink
    {
            int num_xy;
            SimpleXY *simpleXyList         


        

Answer 1

First, the memory you're not freeing is the SimpleXy*Link* myList, not the memory inside the simpleXyList (you're freeing the memory referred to by that just fine).

In general, it's up to you to figure out a way to free all the memory you're using. In general, you'll free the referred-to data before the structure that refers to it, as in:

void FreeSimpleXy(SimpleXyLink *myList) {
    free(myList->simpleXyList);
    free(myList);
}

Note (C++ only), however, that if you used new to allocate these, you must use delete to free instead!

If you're using C++, there's also more foolproof ways. First, destructors. You could change SimpleXyLink like so:

struct SimpleXyLink
{
    int num_xy;
    SimpleXY *simpleXyList;
    ~SimpleXyLink() {
        delete simpleXyList;
    }
    SimpleXyLink() {
        simpleXyList = NULL; // run when object is created with new
    }
};

Now you can just do delete someLink; and it will free the contained simpleXyList automatically. However, keep in mind that you must not use malloc and free now - use new and delete instead:

SimpleXyLink *link = new SimpleXyLink;
link->simpleXyList = new SimpleXYList;
delete link; // all gone!

Finally, there's one more almost-magical way of doing things - using smart pointers (also C++ only). These will be added to the next version of C++, but you can use them today by using the boost library.

struct SimpleXyLink {
    int num_xy;
    boost::scoped_ptr simpleXyList; // or shared_ptr
};

These will eliminate the need to write a destructor (you still must use new and delete however!), but they carry with them other restrictions as well. Read the documentation I linked carefully before using, and feel free to open another question if you're still not sure.