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BUG OF THE MONTH | Free of Pointer not at Start of Buffer

V726 An attempt to free memory containing the ‘wbuf’ array by using the ‘free’ function. This is incorrect as ‘wbuf’ was created on stack. log.cpp 216

template<typename T>
static ALWAYS_INLINE void FormatLogMessageAndPrintW(....)
{
  ....
  wchar_t wbuf[512];
  wchar_t* wmessage_buf = wbuf;
  ....
  if (wmessage_buf != wbuf)
  {
    std::free(wbuf);
  }
  if (message_buf != buf)
  {
    std::free(message_buf);
  }
  ....
}

Here the analyzer detected code with an error. In this code fragment, we see an attempt to delete an array allocated on the stack. Since the memory has not been allocated on the heap, you don’t need to call any special functions like std::free to clear it. When the object is destroyed, the memory is cleared automatically.

Also, when my colleague was editing this article, he considered this warning a false-positive. I described this interesting case in a separate article. So, I invite you to read it: How a PVS-Studio developer defended a bug in a checked project.