Recursively freeing C structs

Question

I have a struct that only contains pointers to memory that I\'ve allocated. Is there a way to recursively free each element that is a pointer rather than calling free on eac

Answer 1

There is no way in the C language to do this, nor would it be desirable - C doesn't know that each member is a distinct pointer allocated via malloc and C contains no run-time type info support to do this - at runtime the compiled code to access the struct is just using offsets off of a base pointer for each member access.

The simplest approach would be to write a "FreeModel" function:

void FreeModel(model* mdl)
{
   free(mdl->vertices);
   ... // Other frees
   free(mdl);
}