[Haskell-cafe] Are handles garbage-collected?

[Simon Marlow]

On 24 October 2004 20:51, Sven Panne wrote:

> IMHO it would be best to use explicit bracketing where possible, and
> hope for the RTS/GC to try its best when one runs out of a given
> resource. Admittedly the current Haskell implementations could be
> improved a little bit in the last respect.

Indeed, GHC could/should try to free up file descriptors when they run
out.  It's a bit tricky though.

At the moment performGC doesn't actually run any finalizers.  It
schedules a thread to run the finalizers, and you hope the thread runs
soon.  So if you're running performGC for the purposes of finalization,
then almost certainly (performGC >> yield) is better.  I've been
wondering whether having a more synchronous kind of finalizer would be a
good thing.

Nevertheless, I agree with the general sentiment on this thread that
file descriptors shouldn't be treated as a resource in the same way as
memory.

Cheers,
	Simon