AutoHotkey Community

[Techrat]

In AHK you can create variables on the fly, but I see no way to remove them. You can set them to empty or blank but the variable name itself remains. In essence, still taking up memory.

I would like to see a 'KillVar' or 'Destroy' or 'Remove' command that could free up that memory on the fly. This would be especially helpful if 'true' arrays are ever implemented.

I use AHK to extract data from CSV files that originate fom databases, then parse the data to format and narrow the list and finally give the user a GUI face for a few choices to select from. Sometimes it becomes quite 'messy' to keep creating new variables, or reuse a bunch of temporary variables, especially if I've been using them like an array and the number of elements dont match.

[Carcophan]

[fincs]

Assigning an empty string to a variable only deletes the memory when it is bigger than 4 kB for performance reasons.
VarSetCapacity(var, 0) actually deletes the memory used by the variable.
Additionally AutoHotkey reserves allocate-only memory for a variable if its initial size is not bigger than 64 bytes (SimpleHeap), of course it changes to malloc'ed memory if you assign it a bigger string.
I think I should take a break from working with the AHK source
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fincs
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[Carcophan]

[Lexikos]

[fincs]

Lexikos, you're right. When I wrote that reply I meant to say the contents but failed horribly at doing so.
I should really stop trying to do things when I'm tired.
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fincs
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[Guest]

I would really love to have a delete variable feature!

I wrote a script that adds lots of hotkeys to an application. It starts at system boot and waits for that application window's class to activate.

There can be multiple processes running the application simultaneously, so the script has to create a large set of variables to store context for each process when that process's window is not active. These context variables have dynamic names like SelectedFeatureFlag%HWND%.

I have a timer that runs every x minute to check if all of the known processes for the application still exist. If any don't the timer routine does SetVarCapacity(var%HWND%, 0) for the unneeded context variables.

This works well, but if my computer is up for a week there can be 100s of these stale, empty variables left around. I realize they do not cause a performance issue, but they sure are annoying when I need to check a live process's context variables with View Variables and their contents.

[Guest]

I agree, this feature is necessary. I generate large (as in hundreds of thousands) array entries as I parse data with autohotkey and when I am done all this memory is still "committed" in virtual memory even though I set the variables I am done with to "". I am running into issues where my virtual memory is exhausted and autohotkey can not create or add to any variables it has. A feature to delete this "committed" memory would be great.

[jaco0646]

[Tuncay]

This seems related: EmptyMem()
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[Lexikos]

[jethrow]