The trick of controlling allocation of external resources by using NOINLINE, unsafePerfromIO, and IORef to create global variables has become an indispensable technique in Haskell. It seems to work well enough with most current compilers. However, it is well known that the semantics of NOINLINE are not sufficient to guarantee that this is safe. In principle, the runtime is permitted to GC and reinstantiate these things at any time. Also, it would be nice if we could have a guarantee that global constants are not instantiated until first use. That would allow us to skip the IORef in some cases. I think this issue needs to be addressed in Haskell'. (If it has already, please accept my apologies.) Since NOINLINE has more general use, perhaps there should be a new pragma for this purpose. Thanks, Yitz