Jochen Kalmbach's WebLog

_wsetlocale memory-leak with VC7.1 and static CRT

It seems that there is a huge memory-leak inside the _wsetlocale function of VC7.1 (VS2003 static CRT).

Here is a small code to reproduce the problem (stupid code, but it generates a very huge memory leak; several MBs/sec):

  #include <tchar.h>

  #include <locale.h>
  int _tmain()
  {
    while(1)
    {
      _tsetlocale(LC_ALL, _T("C"));
    }
    return 0;
  }

Now you need to compile it with cl setlocale_bug.cpp /Od /MTd /D ”_UNICODE” /D “UNICODE”

If you start the resulting EXE, you can see very clear (in task-manager (virtual-bytes) or perfmon (private bytes)) that the memory is steadily growing…

But the good news is: It is fixed in VC2005 Beta 2.