Crashes on load, SDL_Free

[magnusjjj]

For whatever reason, the game crashes when loading. I am compiling with Visual Studio 2022, for x64.

I hunted down the culprit in the form of:

SDL_free(fullpath);

Commenting out that in a couple of places did the trick. As to why that fixes things is an excellent question to which I don't have an answer at the moment ;).

Tried changing it to just free(fullpath); and that worked fine, not sure why the code is using SDL_free when it's not allocated by SDL, but hey. It's something.

[lethal-guitar]

Same issue here. Replacing SDL_free with just free also fixes it, without introducing memory leaks.

I can only imagine that older versions of SDL used to implement SDL_free as a call to free, and that's why it used to work in the past.

[runlevel5]

Same issue here too. It's interesting to know this SDL_free simply refers to the C free. There must be some bug in the SDL2.

[lethal-guitar]

Well, it's not a bug in SDL - it's perfectly reasonable that if a library offers its own memory management functions (SDL_malloc, SDL_free) that you must not mix these library functions with the standard malloc/free. The issue is that this project is using SDL_free on a pointer that was allocated with regular malloc. The allocation happens here and the deallocation here.

That's the core issue, either the allocation should be replaced with SDL_malloc or the SDL_free should be replaced with free. But it happens to work by accident in case SDL_free is implemented as regular free, which is sometimes the case but not always, depending on how SDL is configured. It seems that newer versions of SDL on Windows do not implement SDL_free as a call to regular free, hence the crashes that this issue highlights. But other versions of SDL, or perhaps SDL on other platforms, might implement SDL_free as free and thus hide the issue.