On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 3:17 PM, Shiro Kawai <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 5:32 PM, Alex Shinn <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> From the user perspective there is no separation between
>> the port and any backing store, and they otherwise have no
>> way to free the resources.  You should be able to reliably
>> accumulate a very large port and free it, or alternately
>> maintain many medium ports and not worry about them
>> hogging memory after closing.
>>
>
> If you lose the reference to the port, won't the memory be GC'ed?
>
> It is generally a bad practice to rely on freeing external resources, such
> as file descriptors, by GC.  But for memory, usually we rely on GC.
>

Indeed, but for ports people expect resources are freed
immediately on closing (at least I do).  Users may assume
that closed ports only take a constant amount of memory,
and not bother to free references to them.

Are you arguing in favor of allowing this behavior?  The
only other 3 implementors to comment were all opposed.
Regardless, making a change in favor of this would be
adding new implementation requirements post-facto, and
would be beyond the scope of an errata.  As-is, the result
is unspecified, and if all of the WG members agree we
could explicitly say it "is an error," but anything more than
that should be left for R8RS.

-- 
Alex
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