Is there an acceptable limit for memory leaks?

Question

I\'ve just started experimenting with SDL in C++, and I thought checking for memory leaks regularly may be a good habit to form early on.

With this in mind, I\'ve been

Answer 1

With SDL on Linux in particular, there seem to be some leaking in the underlying X windows library. There's nothing much you can do about those (unless you want to try to fix the library itself, which is probably not for the faint hearted).

You can use valgrind's suppression mechanism (see --suppressions and --gen-suppressions in the valgrind man page) to tell it not to bother you with these errors.

In general we do have to be a little more lenient with third party libraries; while we should absolutely not accept memory leaks in our own code, and the presence of memory leaks should be a factor when choosing between alternative third party libraries, sometimes there's no choice but to ignore them (though it may be a good idea to report them to the library maintainer).