[Peter Johnson]

Originally Posted by Thad House

Whats also great about the WPILib is that whenever you initialize a digital port, delete it, and create a new one, the HAL leaks 6 bytes. Now since many teams don't do this, its not a big deal, but still, its a little odd that an official program has a memory leak, even if it is such a small rare one.

Note that at the HAL level, freeDIO() is the opposite of allocateDIO(), and not the opposite of initializeDigitalPort(). The initializeDigitalPort function allocates the memory you're talking about, and was only intended to be called once (ever) per port, with the caller being responsible for saving the resulting pointer across multiple uses. The lack of an uninit function to free the memory in question is admittedly poor API design, but it's worth noting that the higher level WPILib classes use the HAL consistent with the above (call init once, then just use allocate/free), and thus have no memory leaks in this case even if you create/destroy multiple times per port.

I've found that the WPI folks are very welcoming of patches... I'm sure a patch to add appropriate uninit functions to the HAL would be accepted in short order.