[Haskell-cafe] Re: Re: hxt memory useage

[Rene de Visser]

"Uwe Schmidt" <uwe at fh-wedel.de> schrieb im Newsbeitrag 
news:200801281413.17375.uwe at fh-wedel.de...
> this statement isn't true in general. HXT itself can be incremental, if 
> there
> is no need for traversing the whole XML tree. When processing a document
> containing a DTD, indeed there is a need even when no validation is 
> required,
> for traversal because of the entity substitution.

It would be nice if HXT was incremental even when you are processing the 
whole tree.

If I remember correctly, the data type of the tree in HXT is something like

data Tree = Tree NodeData [Tree]

which means that already processed parts of the tree can't be garbage 
collected because the parent node is holding onto them.

If instead it was

data Tree = Tree NodeData (IORef [Tree])

Would could remove each subtree as it was processed (well just before would 
probably be necessary, and we would need to rely on blackholing to remove 
the reference on the stack). This would perhaps allow already processed 
subtree to be garbage collected. Together with the lazy evaluation this 
could lead to quite good memory usage.

Rene.