Re: [Caml-list] Structural avoidance of memory leaks?

[David Baelde <david.baelde@gmail.com>]

Hi list,

In my experience, that kind of problem happens with global references.
Of course, there's nothing to worry about with global immutable
things. We often have to use a global register of objects of some kind
(for unique identifiers, maintenance tasks, etc) and we forget that
this global store accumulates data over time and may become the only
reference to an object that should be dead. A simple solution is to
use weak tables when appropriate.

Memory leaks are less likely to be caused by a single function,
because they are generally not long lived, and the programmer of that
function would have in mind how much data it uses. It is possible to
have a function that runs forever and accumulates data (even a pure
function) but it'd generally be visible.

Cheers,
-- 
David