MSDN, always helpful, says the following:

Quote:When the memory DC is created, its display surface is exactly one monochrome pixel wide and one monochrome pixel high.

When using a back buffer for double-buffering, you'll obviously need to replace that default display surface with another bitmap. This may be silly, but my question is this: will calling DeleteDC() for that back buffer on exit without restoring the original display surface cause a memory leak (however small it may be)?

Quote:Original post by LessBread
On exit? Do you mean when the process exits? If so, then no. The OS reclaims the resources used by a process when that process exits. gdiobj.zip is a free utility from the author of "Windows Graphics Programming: Win32 GDI and DirectDraw" - It can help you check for leaking gdi objects, dc, bitmap, etc. Use it to run some tests on programs that you think might leak.

Yes, I did mean when the process exits.

The reason I ask this question is because I was looking at an example of double-buffering using regular GDI. It saved off the "old" (i.e. default) bitmap of the back buffer when selecting a newly created bitmap into it. When the game exits, the code restores the old bitmap into the back buffer -- just before deleting the back buffer. Maybe I'm naive, but it seems a bit silly to me to have yet another global variable just for saving an old bitmap which takes up a single monochrome pixel's worth of memory. But if there is a compelling reason for doing so, please let me know.

Thanks for your input! I will give that utility a spin. :)

Process exit forgives a multitude of sins in Windows (at least since 95 or so), but if you use a language anything like C++, use RAII techniques to make sure you give back everything you take. Or, better, find a package that takes care of it for you. Resource management in Windows tends to be slightly quirky and nothing you want to get too close to.