Clarifiaction Regarding VTK Garbage Collection:

Development
1

Hello All,

I have a more general question about VTKs architecture and how the VTK garbage collector works.

If I have a class and inside the classes private members I use a vtkSmartPointer<> to hold a piece of VTK data (Filter, Array, etc…) and then I create an instance of the class I will get a “double free or corruption (!prev)” error. From following the stack trace it looks like the memory is attempted to be freed twice, but I can not figure out why. Moving the vtkSmartPointer<> to a public member made the error go away witch further confused me.

I can attach a minimum working example if the question is not clear, but I presumed this was a common error. Specifically why it seems to break with private members of classes would be greatly appreciated as its nice to be able to protect data with private members.

2

Example please

3

Just want to provide an answer in case someone else stumbles upon this question:

I had a custom filter that was deleting the data-object without updating the reference count of the smart pointer resulting in the cleanup of the member trying to free the memory twice.