Merlyn wrote "That'll be faster, safer, won't leak memory like a sieve"

Is Merlyn saying that poorly coded Perl can leak memory?

According to the Memory Advisor page "A leak is a data area that your program allocated but did not free, even though your program will not use the memory again. In many instances, the data area has no pointer..."

I thought that Perl takes care of such matters automatically, and that memory leaks were not a problem in Perl programs. Now I think from the comments of Merlyn and others that memory leaks can indeed be a problem in Perl.

For instance, Jamie Zawinski wrote in a 1998 article that

just about all of the open source garbage collectors are junk (e.g., Perl, Python, and Emacs.) Perl's GC is an especially bad joke: if you have circular references, the objects won't get collected until the program exits! Give me a break!

Do poorly-coded Perl programs really contain memory leaks?

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: eval with sub by sierrathedog04
in thread eval with sub by strredwolf

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