On Tue, 2011-02-15 at 14:06 -0500, Brandon S Allbery KF8NH wrote: > > entirely consumed that the descriptor gets closed. Is hGetContents > > responsible > > for closing the descriptor? Or is it the garbage collector? Who closes the > > descriptor when the contents are read? Looking at hGetContents function > > The garbage collector closes the handle, as I understand it.
The handle is actually closed as soon as you read all the way to the end of the file. However, because reading is done as a side effect of forcing a lazy, supposedly-pure value, it's hard to predict when that will happen, and apprently unrelated changes in a different part of the program can cause it to never happen and cause you to leak file handles. In a way, it's analogous to the situation with garbage collection and closing file handles in finalizers; but the details are different and the unpredictable file closing comes from lazy evaluation rather than garbage collection. -- Chris Smith _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
