ezyang’s blog

the arc of software bends towards understanding

The cost of weak pointers and finalizers in GHC

Weak pointers and finalizers are a very convenient feature for many types of programs. Weak pointers are useful for implementing memotables and solving certain classes of memory leaks, while finalizers are useful for fitting "allocate/deallocate" memory models into a garbage-collected language. Of course, these features don’t come for free, and so one might wonder what […]

  • May 4, 2014