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GNU libavl 2.0.1

5.11.2 Aside: Recursive Destruction

The algorithm used in the previous section is easy and fast, but it is not the most common method for destroying a tree. The usual way is to perform a traversal of the tree, in much the same way we did for tree traversal and copying. Once again, we'll start from a recursive implementation, because these are so easy to write. The only tricky part is that subtrees have to be freed before the root. This code is hard-wired to use free() for simplicity:

static void bst_destroy_recursive (struct bst_node *node) { if (node == NULL) return; bst_destroy_recursive (node->bst_link[0]); bst_destroy_recursive (node->bst_link[1]); free (node); }