On 24 October 2004 20:51, Sven Panne wrote:
IMHO it would be best to use explicit bracketing where possible, and hope for the RTS/GC to try its best when one runs out of a given resource. Admittedly the current Haskell implementations could be improved a little bit in the last respect.
Indeed, GHC could/should try to free up file descriptors when they run out. It's a bit tricky though. At the moment performGC doesn't actually run any finalizers. It schedules a thread to run the finalizers, and you hope the thread runs soon. So if you're running performGC for the purposes of finalization, then almost certainly (performGC >> yield) is better. I've been wondering whether having a more synchronous kind of finalizer would be a good thing. Nevertheless, I agree with the general sentiment on this thread that file descriptors shouldn't be treated as a resource in the same way as memory. Cheers, Simon