The two issues are orthogonal. Even if Clojure had been going for full copies to preserve immutability, the reason why the "old" copy would leak is only because your code would hold a reference to it.
With structural sharing, those bits of "old" that are still retained in "new" are precisely those bits that weren't modified between the two versions, and certainly have to stay in memory, because they belong in "new" too. As for the bits of "old" that point to this shared part, if nothing *else* points to them, then there's no reason for them not to be GC'd apart from the references that *your* code might hold on them. On Apr 3, 3:13 pm, "David R. Smith" <davesmith....@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi All, > > I'm sold on the virtues of immutable data, but the notion of > "persistent in-memory data structures" sounds kind of like a euphemism > for a garbage collection leak. > > Could someone point me to a reference explaining how persistent > transactional memory works in the context of garbage collection? Are > there special issues related to garbage collection I need to be > concerned with when using Seqs? > > Sincerely, > > Dave Smith -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.
