e as long as the function containing it (actually its prototype)
is not garbage collected.
</p>
<p>
Objects which are passed as an argument to an external C&nbsp;function
are kept alive until the call returns. So it's generally safe to
create temporary cdata objects in argument lists. This is a common
idiom for <a href="#convert_vararg">passing specific C&nbsp;types to
vararg functions</a>.
</p>
<p>
Memory areas returned by C functions (e.g. from <tt>malloc()</tt>)
must be manually managed, of course (or us