5.2. Ownership¶

All parameters are, by default, unowned, unless marked with the owned keyword. All return values and ref and out parameters are, by default, owned, unless marked with the unowned keyword. The basic types mentioned above have no ownership since they may be copied at will.

It is often the case that a function will return one of its input values, particularly when filling a buffer. It is crucial that the ownership is correct. If not done correctly, Vala will acquire a second copy of the pointer that it thinks it has to free, and free the same chunk of memory twice, leaking to a bad time spent in Valgrind.

If ownership semantics are not correct, either a memory leak has been written or a double-free has been written. It is frequently the case that one needs to read the source to be absolutely sure that ownership semantics are correct.

Often C programmers will mark return values as const when they are unowned.