From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2005-10-16T05:16:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Help! define_method leaking procs...

Hi,

In message "Re: Help! define_method leaking procs..."
    on Sun, 16 Oct 2005 05:01:58 +0900, Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@zenspider.com> writes:

|Someone on IRC made this claim a while ago so I looked into it. Doing  
|tens of thousands of define_methods certainly increased the memory  
|footprint, but explicit calls to GC.start every 100 calls or so kept  
|it to a bare minimum. I don't think it is a real leak, but I could be  
|wrong. I can talk to you about it in more depth if you grab me later  
|today or tomorrow.

Since define_method creates reference to the block (a closure) which
holds reference to the variables in the external scope.  So that if
it's not a real memory leak, isolating define_method with block by a
separate method may help, e.g.  changing

  define_method(:foo){...}

to

  def def_something(name)
    define_method(name){...}
  end
  ...
  def_something(:foo)

							matz.