On 2008 Sep 6, at 18:25, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
1. Results from initialisers cannot be GC'd even if they become otherwise unreachable, because the dynamic loader might re-load the module (and then we'd need those original results).
2. If the dynamic loader loads an endless stream of different modules containing initialisers, memory will thus leak.
I think if the issue is this vs. not being able to guarantee any once- only semantics, i consider the former necessary overhead for proper program behavior. And that, given that there exists extra-program global state that one might want to access, once-only initialization is a necessity. (Whoever it was who jumped off this point to say Haskell should exit the real world misses the point: it's not even all that useful from a theoretical standpoint if it's not allowed to interact with anything outside itself, and stdin/stdout tend to require once-only initialization. You can't really hide from it.) -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH