[Caml-list] Dynamic linking, reloading and garbage collection

[Caml-list] Dynamic linking, reloading and garbage collection

[Nuutti Kotivuori]

I am thinking of a system where I would be dynamically loading files,
repeatedly in a long-lived OCaml process. But I am a bit uncertain how
things are handled.

Let's just assume Dynlink.loadfile_private for now - since loadfile
seems to open up a can of worms I'd rather not deal with, including
segmentation faults if interfaces change.

What is actually changed when I do Dynlink.loadfile_private? What
happens when I do Dynlink.loadfile_private again on the same file? 
Assuming also that the file could have changed in the meanwhile.

Atleast something is left behind right now. If I do:

,----
| Dynlink.init ();;
| Gc.print_stat stdout;;
| for i = 0 to 50000 do
|   Dynlink.loadfile_private "test.cmo";
| done;;
| Gc.compact ();;
| Gc.print_stat stdout;;
`----

I find that the process eats 20 megs of memory after loading the file
50000 times. And if I change that to be 100000 times, I get a fatal
exception of Stack_overflow. This is a bit worrying, since it might
have to scale up to 100000 different files some day as well.

So what gives? Or should I just read the source more?

-- Naked

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