devel/p5-Test-Weaken 3.022000nb14 NetBSD

Test::Weaken helps detect unfreed Perl data in arrays, hashes, scalars, objects, etc, by descending recursively through structures and watching that everything is freed. Unfreed data is a useless overhead and may cause an application to abend due to lack of memory.

Normally if the last reference to something is discarded then it and anything in it is freed automatically. But this might not occur due to circular references, unexpected global variables or closures, or reference counting mistakes in XSUBs.

Test::Weaken is named for the strategy used to detect leaks. References are taken to the test objects and all their contents, then those references are weakened and expected to be then freed.

There's options to ignore intentional globals, or include extra associated data held elsewhere, or invoke an explicit destructor. Unfreed parts are reported and can be passed to other modules such as Devel::FindRef to try to discover why they weren't freed.

Test::Weaken examines structures to an unlimited depth and is safe on circular structures.