Comment by zamberzand

The homepage still makes the claim that "[autofree] takes care of most objects (~90-100%): the compiler inserts necessary free calls automatically during compilation."

There is no citation for where this 90-100% number comes from, it seems to be pulled completely out of thin air.

Autofree, as it currently exists, cannot handle structs at all, so any program whose memory allocations consist of more than 10% structs unfortunately proves this claim false.

For a specific example, a while ago I wrote a minimax tictactoe program[1] in V, which specifically used a struct to store the board state rather than an array.

In this case, with the minimax running for 4 total moves, valgrind tells me:

  ==8518== HEAP SUMMARY:
  ==8518==     in use at exit: 2,250,360 bytes in 68,544 blocks
  ==8518==   total heap usage: 161,756 allocs, 93,212 frees, 4,762,235 bytes allocated

So only 93212/161756 allocations were freed, which is 57%.

... Now, I don't actually care that much that autofree doesn't work on structs. I think that's quite reasonable, as it's a very difficult thing to implement!

But, in my opinion, your website should really cite where this 90-100% number comes from, i.e. which benchmarks were used to generate it, so that it is clear that it isn't just completely made up.

(As it currently stands, I would argue this is false advertising specifically because there's no citation for this number!)

[1]: https://pastebin.com/6ZDKKRQR