[Haskell-cafe] Re: Looking for the fastest Haskell primes

[Jules Bean]

Eugene Kirpichov wrote:
> The parameterless version is a top-level definition and won't get
> garbage-collected, IIRC.

This has not-much to do with CAFs and is really just about scope + 
values + liveness. live values (those which a program still refers to, 
e.g. from a function which might get called in the future) don't get GCed.

CAFs are just in the top-most scope and particularly likely to get held 
live in this fashion.

As Lennart points out, optimisations occasionally increase sharing, 
although GHC tries fairly hard not to do this.

Jules