Will it be garbage-collected? Anonymous subs cannot be GCed as far as I understand.

Unreferenced subroutines should be destroyed and garbage collected in perl (general caveats about circular references probably apply to subs too, I guess). IIRC there have been some problems in the past with memory leaks when removing subs (bugs in the perl interpreter: creating and destroying subs is valid and supported), so I just tested the following code in 5.8.5 and the process's memory use doesn't grow at all (it seems to be safe): 

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use strict;

while (1) {

    my @arr = 'x' x 1000000;

    my $subref = sub {
        @arr;
    }
}

[download]
"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

In reply to Re: Lost anonymous subs by Joost
in thread Lost anonymous subs by kappa

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.