clearing GHCi (and, by extension, hint) loaded module dependencies
Context: My language uses hint to interpret Haskell code at runtime, via `load: "path/to/file.hs"`. Hint works similar to ":load foo.hs" in GHCi (it uses the GHC API). After the source is interpreted the module's `load` function is executed in the language's VM. There is no valuable result; it is executed for its side-effects, usually definitions. Problem: Around 80MB[1] is used up by the module's dependencies and never freed. Subsequent "load:"s are faster, but that 80MB overhead can be expensive on things like VPSes. This can be simulated in GHCi by doing ":load foo.hs" followed by a ":load" to clear the loaded modules; the memory usage doesn't go down (understandably, in this case), and :loading it again is much faster. Is there any way to "hard reset" or free the memory being used for the loaded module's dependencies? Thanks, Alex [1]: number determined by loading an "empty" script, i.e. `load = return ()`
On 18/09/2010 03:03, Alex Suraci wrote:
Context: My language uses hint to interpret Haskell code at runtime, via `load: "path/to/file.hs"`. Hint works similar to ":load foo.hs" in GHCi (it uses the GHC API). After the source is interpreted the module's `load` function is executed in the language's VM. There is no valuable result; it is executed for its side-effects, usually definitions.
Problem: Around 80MB[1] is used up by the module's dependencies and never freed. Subsequent "load:"s are faster, but that 80MB overhead can be expensive on things like VPSes.
This can be simulated in GHCi by doing ":load foo.hs" followed by a ":load" to clear the loaded modules; the memory usage doesn't go down (understandably, in this case), and :loading it again is much faster.
Is there any way to "hard reset" or free the memory being used for the loaded module's dependencies?
The memory is held on to by the GHC Session, so if you discard the Session and start a new one all the cached information should be released. Cheers, Simon
participants (2)
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Alex Suraci -
Simon Marlow