[Haskell-cafe] Re: Top Level <-

[Ashley Yakeley]

Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
> I would call it a leak if something that is no longer being used cannot 
> be reclaimed. The endless stream of different modules is possible in 
> long-running systems where the code being run evolves or changes over 
> time (e.g. something like lambdabot, which runs user-provided code).

This might be fixable with an option to the dynamic load function.

Let us say a module M has a number of top-level <- of the form

   val <- exp

The set of ACIO expressions exp is the "static initialisers" of M. The 
RTS must note when each static initialiser is run, and cache its result 
val. Let's call this cache of vals the "static results cache" of M.

When M is loaded, and a static results cache for M already exists, then 
it will be used for the vals of M.

It is the static results cache that might leak.

Let us have an flag to the dynamic load function, to mark the static 
results cache of M as "freeable". If the static results cache is 
freeable, then it will be deleted when M is unloaded (and M is not part 
of the main program).

If you pass True for this flag, your code is unsafe if all of the following:

* M has static initialisers
* M will be loaded again after unloading
* Values from M will be stored elsewhere in the program.

If you pass False for this flag, your code will continuously leak memory 
if you continuously load modules

* that are all different
* that contain static initialisers

There may also have to be some way to specify how to apply the flag to 
dependencies as well.

In general I'm way beyond my knowledge of the RTS, so I may have 
something Very Wrong here. I don't think hs-plugins implements unloading 
  at all currently.

-- 
Ashley Yakeley