John Meacham wrote:
GHC has 'pinned arrays' that have this behavior. however, you probably
don't want to use them as they simply give the garbage collector less
choices about what to do possibly decreasing its efficiency. The garbage
collector already is free to not copy arrays if it feels it isn't worth
it, by pinning them you simply take away its ability to choose to do so
if it is needed.
To be a little more concrete, all arrays larger than ~3k are effectively
pinned in GHC right now, as in they are never copied. If the array is
unboxed, then it is never traversed by the GC either, so large unboxed
arrays have basically zero GC cost. There's no need for any help from the
programmer, it's done automatically by the GC.
For smaller arrays, as John says there's a tradeoff in whether to pin them
or not. Pinning avoids copying in the GC, but might lead to fragmentation.
Pinning is necessary if you want to pass the address of the memory to an
FFI call at any point, which is why bytestring pins its arrays.
Cheers,
Simon
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