[Gdal-dev] GDALClose vs delete

[Frank Warmerdam]

On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 12:41:45 -0500, William Lyons
<wlyons at prologic-inc.com> wrote:
>  
> Frank and List,  
> 
> The documentation for GDALClose() mention that it should be used for data
> sets opened with GDALOpenShared(). 
> 
> And that C++ delete should be used for data sets opened with GDALOpen(). 
> 
> But, which should be used to close datasets that are the product of a
> GDALCreate() or GDALCreateCopy() call? 

William, 

In theory a delete is fine for the results of GDALCreate() or
GDALCreateCopy().  However, you can also safely use
GDALClose() for all these, and I normally do.  The special
issue with GDALOpenShared() is that GDALClose() first
dereferences the dataset and then deletes it if the reference
count has dropped to zero.  

Also, in a windows build environment where different DLLs 
have different heaps, using delete outside the DLL in which 
the new took place can be very dangerous.  So I also avoid
use of delete for that reason. 

Best regards,

-- 
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