2009/2/12 Peter Verswyvelen
It is funny that recently I had a strange problem in C# (I tried to write parts of Reactive in C#) where the garbage collector freed data that was actually needed by my program! I had to fix that by putting a local variable on the stack, passing the constructed data to a function did not work. I think .NET and Java the garbage collector traverses from data (the stack, globals, etc). If I understood Simon correctly, GHC traverse the code blocks instead, which feels correct as it would have fixed the bug I had in C#. So yet again an extreme difference between Haskell and .NET/Java even when it comes to garbage collection, Haskell wins :)
I'm curious, a GC that removes live data is a buggy GC. What was holding the pointer to the data, if it was not the stack? Were you with MS .NET or with Mono? -- Felipe.