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From: xclerc <xavier.clerc@inria.fr>
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Cc: xclerc Clerc <xavier.clerc@inria.fr>
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Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Structural avoidance of memory leaks?


Le 9 févr. 2011 à 09:47, David MENTRE a écrit :

> Hello Mr. Garrigue,
> 
> 2011/2/9 Jacques Garrigue <garrigue@math.nagoya-u.ac.jp>:
>> * Memory leaks: have to be careful that you are not referencing dead data, preventing the GC from freeing it.
> 
> I thought for a long time that having a GC would avoid any memory
> leak. It appears that this is not the case. Java programmers are well
> aware of the issue and apparently Haskell and OCaml programmers also.

The Java literature about this problem is in fact quite abundant.
One reason for this being that Java is widely used for server-side
applications that have a very long lifetime (think webserver, and
the like). This is why J2EE developer are particularly aware of the
problem. I would add that a related problem to some leaks in these
systems is security (e. g. keeping passwords or other sensitive information
in memory longer than needed).This is probably a problem some
OCaml developer face, maybe Ocsigen developers and/or users.

Finally, if you read some Java papers that refers to the "jconsole"
tool to discover such leaks, the closest OCaml equivalent I can
think of is ocamlviz:
	http://ocamlviz.forge.ocamlcore.org/


Hope this helps,

Xavier Clerc