Garbage collection and cgo

Question

Is it possible to make the garbage collector in Go handle and release memory allocated through C code? I apologize, I haven\'t used C and cgo before so my examples may need some

Answer 1

There exists the runtime.SetFinalizer function, but it cannot be used on any object allocated by C code.

However, you can create a Go object for each C object that needs to be freed automatically:

type Stuff struct {
    cStuff *C.Stuff
}

func NewStuff() *Stuff {
    s := &Stuff{C.NewStuff()}
    runtime.SetFinalizer(s, (*Stuff).Free)
    return s
}

func (s *Stuff) Free() {
    C.Free(s.cStuff)
}