Re: Emacs bzr memory footprint

[Dave Abrahams]

on Thu Oct 13 2011, Eli Zaretskii <eliz-AT-gnu.org> wrote:

>> From: Dave Abrahams <address@hidden>
>
>> Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 10:10:19 -0400
>> 
>> 
>> on Thu Oct 13 2011, Eli Zaretskii <eliz-AT-gnu.org> wrote:
>> 
>> >> Are there known leaks with erlang-mode or haskell-mode?
>> >
>> > There can be no memory leak on the Lisp side.  Any leaks are always
>> > bugs in Emacs, not in any Lisp code that it runs.
>> 
>> I'm not an expert on Emacs internals, but I think that depends on
>> whether they are memory leaks or "memory leaks," the latter being when
>> references are held longer than necessary.  Also, presumably, until
>> something forces a garbage collection, even unreferenced memory may
>> appear to be "in use."
>
> Well, that's true, but then this is not a "memory leak", it's
> incorrect use of memory.
>
> Actually, the more I think about this, the more I wonder how would a
> Lisp program "keep around" unneeded objects.  Maybe if it interns many
> symbols, or defines a lot of global variables.  Or maybe I'm missing
> something.  Let's put it this way: I think a Lisp program needs to
> work very hard to produce this kind of "leaks".

Typical examples arise with caches of various sorts.  This is a
well-known phenomenon in the Java world, and there's nothing particular
to lisp or Java that should make lisp any different.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com