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Leaking Space.

The article discusses space leaks, which is when a computer program uses more of the computer's memory than is necessary. The control of a computer program's evaluation to reduce the time between allocating and discarding memory to eliminate space leaks is discussed. Lazy evaluations, when an evalua...

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Published in:Communications of the ACM Vol. 56; no. 11; pp. 44 - 53
Main Author: MITCHELL, NEIL
Format: Article
Published: Association for Computing Machinery Nov2013
Subjects:
Programming languages
Computer programming
Systems programming (Computer science)
Computer storage capacity
Computer storage devices
Computer software
Computer science
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Summary:The article discusses space leaks, which is when a computer program uses more of the computer's memory than is necessary. The control of a computer program's evaluation to reduce the time between allocating and discarding memory to eliminate space leaks is discussed. Lazy evaluations, when an evaluation of an expressing is delayed until its value is needed, and closures, a function combined with its environment are both considered as a cause of space leaks and attributed to lazy functional programming languages.