Ignore context parameter in APIs that free handles.#5738
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teo-tsirpanis merged 5 commits intomainfrom Jan 29, 2026
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As explained in #5219 (review), the requirement to pass contexts in APIs that free handles significantly increases the complexity of lifetime management in APIs for garbage-collected languages, where the objects can be finalized in any order.1
Because freeing these objects is trivial and can only fail if the input pointer is null2, we don't actually need the context to set a detailed error code. Therefore, this PR makes the context parameter optional, and updates all usages to pass
nullptrorNULL, depending or the language.TYPE: C_API
DESC: The context parameter in functions
tiledb_aggregate_free,tiledb_query_channel_freeandtiledb_query_field_freebecame unused.Footnotes
For example, it's not possible to expose the aggregate APIs in TileDB-Go, without rewriting the interop system. ↩
And if the pointer is invalid, but that's UB and we can't do anything about it. ↩