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Don’t abuse FreeAndNil anymore

A recurring subject when it comes to freeing objects and preventing is whether you should just .Free them, thus leaving a invalid reference that should however never be used anymore when the code design is correct, or if you should defensively FreeAndNil() them, thus leaving a nil value that will hopefully trigger AVs more often on improper usage after release.

Allen Bauer recently brought this subject in his blog “A case against FreeAndNil [1]“, arguing that there are better tools than FreeAndNil to diagnose improper usage after release, and that it can hide other issues and lead to other magic bullet solutions, which only further the problem. This is true, and FastMM debug mode can do wonders here, however, quite often, you don’t want to rely on a debug and diagnostic machinery that needs to be switched ON for problems to be detected early on.

Well, if you’re using FreeAndNil() for defensive purposes, don’t abuse it anymore, invest in a few lines of code for a shiny new FreeAndInvalidate():

procedure FreeAndInvalidate(var obj);
var
   temp : TObject;
begin
   temp := TObject(obj);
   Pointer(obj) := Pointer(1);
   temp.Free;
end;

This function frees the object and sets the reference to an invalid magic value, which will trigger and AV on improper field or virtual method access after release  (just like FreeAndNil), but unlike FreeAndNil, it will also AV on multiple .Free attempt, and will not be stopped by “if Assigned()” checks. If you wish even more defense, you can also “sabotage” the VMT pointer of the freed object instance.

With a FreeAndInvalidate() added to your bag of tricks, you can now reserve FreeAndNil usage to situations where having a nil reference is truly part of the design, and no longer abuse it for defensive programming. Of course this is still no magic-bullet, but it’s cheap enough that you can use it in release builds (unlike debug and diagnostic tools), and as a bonus, it makes it obvious when reading the code that the object reference is supposed to be invalid after the call.