ABI and Memory Ownership

ABI and Memory Ownership

Encoding

All input and output strings use UTF-8 and are null terminated.

Ownership Rule

Every non-null char* returned by V2Root Core is owned by the caller and must be released exactly once with:

void FreeCString(char *value);

Passing null to FreeCString is safe.

Never use free, HeapFree, LocalFree, CoTaskMemFree, or a language runtime allocator on returned pointers.

Null and Empty Values

Result	Meaning
Null from Start or Stop	Success
Non-null from Start or Stop	Allocated error message
Allocated empty string from parser APIs	Parse/conversion failure

An empty parser result still needs FreeCString.

Safe C Pattern

char *status = GetStatus();
if (status != NULL) {
    printf("%s\n", status);
    FreeCString(status);
}

Wrapper Requirements

• Copy the native string before releasing it.
• Do not expose raw pointers outside the wrapper.
• Do not unload the library while returned pointers are alive.
• Use the generated header as the ABI source of truth.

Public Memory API

FreeCString

void FreeCString(char *value);

This is the only supported release function for native strings.