Yet another weakly defined bug report

Daan Leijen daanleijen@xs4all.nl
Thu, 13 Feb 2003 16:12:26 +0100


> These things are always tricky to understand, which is why I recommend
> not using lazy I/O.  File reading is not a pure operation: running out
> of file descriptors is a good counter-example.

Without saying wether I agree with lazy I/O or not, I suggest that
this particular problem may also be due to the runtime implementation:
If one tries to open  a new file but the file descriptors are exhausted,
the runtime system should first trigger a full GC because that might
free up some descriptors -- but maybe GHC is already doing this?

This brings me to another "issue". It would be nice if we can create
foreign pointers with a resource estimate. That is,  a foreign pointer to 
a bitmap might have a high resource estimate. This resource estimate can be 
used by the garbage collector to collect more aggressively if the "foreign" 
resources become filled. I haven't fleshed out a complete design yet,
but it should be somehow possible to express that file-descriptors have
a rather high resource estimate, as they run out after about 200 have been
allocated.

All the best,
    Daan.

> Cheers,
> Simon
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