10.8 Fundamentals - Garbage collection

• Because environment is attached to (enclosed by) function, temporary objects don’t go away.

Cleaning up using rm() inside a function:

f_dirty <- function(n) {
  x <- runif(n)
  m <- mean(x)
  function() m
}

f_clean <- function(n) {
  x <- runif(n)
  m <- mean(x)
  rm(x)            # <---- Important part!
  function() m
}

lobstr::obj_size(f_dirty(1e6))
#> 8.00 MB
lobstr::obj_size(f_clean(1e6))
#> 504 B