[Haskell-cafe] Re: space leak with 'concat' ?

[Simon Marlow]

Jake McArthur wrote:
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> Henning Thielemann wrote:
> | in that module I defined the text to be printed as top-level
> | variable which might have been the problem. But this can't be the
> | problem of the compiled version of the program, where I encountered the
> | leak. So I have to keep on searching that leak.
> 
> You have created a constant applicative form (commonly abbreviated CAF).
> GHC assumes that all top level declarations are constants, and simply
> does not garbage collect them.

FUD!  CAFs are definitely garbage collected, in fact we have a big lump of 
code generator and runtime complexity (Static Reference Tables, SRTs) to 
ensure that they do.

However, GHCi doesn't always GC CAFs, perhaps that's what you meant.

Cheers,
	Simon