Thanks for the compliment Uhrwerk, and your 'description' of the issue is far
more accurate and descriptive than any Ive given to date.

I know from previous / lead-up discussions with Carlos that he was
DEFINATELY going to be using ent_clone in the FUTURE, thats why I warned
him of this issue. Yes it IS ent_clone that has the problem.
It is quite possible I omitted telling Carlos it was ent_clone specific,
and left it under the GENERALIZED heading of ent_create...
(Sorry Carlos, if I gave you a false impression there.)


When I first discovered this issue, it took a long discussion / argument with
JCL before he convinced me that is was not a BUG, but an ARCHITECTURAL LIMITATION.
Therefore no bug report... And I guess thats also why there was never any
mention of it being 'fixed' by A8, cause it was never officially 'broken'.
Believe me, I TRIED to get it on the bug-list, but JCL convinced me otherwise.


Spirit: If you dont believe there was ever this issue, load up an old A7 and try my code.
(yes this will work 'after' A8 is installed, but you may need to re-install
A8 after doing the test.)
If you dont believe me or my words, maybe you'll believe your eyes...


One personal drawback from this issue being fixed is that I can now throw
away about 6 months of difficult programming development, dammit...
But, in truth, good riddance to it. Back to the drawing board...

And thank you Carlos3DGS, for noticing how obsolete I have gotten...
Time to drag myself (kicking and screaming) into the 'A8'th-century.

I've seen this discussion, maybe I can shed some light on that issue.

A memory leak is a bug and no "architectural limitation". We have no records that anyone found a memory leak with ent_create, and I don't think that such a leak existed. The ent_create function is more or less unchanged since A4.

There was however indeed a memory leak reported with ent_clone in A7 version 7.73 - this seems to be the leak that you meant. I can not remember a long discussion, but it was a clear and obvious bug that was fixed in the next version, 7.75. You can find it in the bug list in your A7 manual. We're grateful for notifying us of such bugs.

So if you hear rumors of some bug on the forum, better communicate with us rather than spending months of heavy programming for working around it. We might save you some time.

JCL:

The reason this 'bug' has re-surfaced in the community topics is entirely MY fault.
When I first found it, back in 2009, the discussion I had with you (in the latter
part of THIS thread) left me with the ASSUMPTION it was not a bug, but a known limitation.
(as you can see from my final comment in my final post there)
I see now it wasnt a LONG discussion, it just seemed it at the time.
And it was a long time ago, memory can play tricks on you...

So, because I thought it was not a bug, I never looked for it being fixed.

So when I saw someone heading towards a (percieved) pothole,
I naturally warned them of it.
Unfortunately, I was not aware you had fixed that pothole...

Again, apologies to all...

Im just going to have to be more consistanrt in my checking
of the updates in the reported-bug-list.

It's been a while since I had time to continue with my work and browse the forums.
I just came back and wanted to thank everyone that helped clarify this, and also thanks to jcl for personally adressing this topic.