Re: Emacs bzr memory footprint

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Dave Abrahams <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 10:10:19 -0400
> 
> 
> on Thu Oct 13 2011, Eli Zaretskii <eliz-AT-gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> >> Are there known leaks with erlang-mode or haskell-mode?
> >
> > There can be no memory leak on the Lisp side.  Any leaks are always
> > bugs in Emacs, not in any Lisp code that it runs.
> 
> I'm not an expert on Emacs internals, but I think that depends on
> whether they are memory leaks or "memory leaks," the latter being when
> references are held longer than necessary.  Also, presumably, until
> something forces a garbage collection, even unreferenced memory may
> appear to be "in use."

Well, that's true, but then this is not a "memory leak", it's
incorrect use of memory.

Actually, the more I think about this, the more I wonder how would a
Lisp program "keep around" unneeded objects.  Maybe if it interns many
symbols, or defines a lot of global variables.  Or maybe I'm missing
something.  Let's put it this way: I think a Lisp program needs to
work very hard to produce this kind of "leaks".