How to Purge All Memory w/o Reboot?

[Eunomiac 6]

When I'm testing a program, my standard "workflow" is to Ctrl-Alt-C out of the program and simply re-run it, whenever I want to test new code.

 

I know to use package.loaded[library] = nil to unload libraries, but I'm running into two other issues after I started playing around with event.timer():

• How do I cancel or purge all timers in response to a Ctrl-Alt-C interrupt?  Is there something similar to package.loaded[lib] = nil; library = require(lib) that I can add to the beginning of my programs to wipe out timers from previous runs?
• Some elements (I'm not sure which) of my programs are persisting in memory after Ctrl-Alt-C'ing out, resulting in the occasional out-of-memory error if I don't reboot before restarting the program.  I suppose a broader question that would encompass the first bullet might be "is there a command I can call to "purge" everything from the interrupted run of my script, ensuring each time I call my main program it begins in a completely clear environment?"

Thanks!

[Sangar 92]

The timer list is a local variable, it's not in the table returned by require("event"), so that won't work. In general this isn't trivial, because a number of libraries depend on the event library to work (such as for keeping a primary component to name one). The best bet would probably wrapping your actual program code in a pcall and clear up any timers / event listeners after that returns. I.e.
 

function main(...)
  -- Your actual code.
end
 
pcall(main, ...)
-- Clean up timers, listeners, ...

[dgelessus 26]

Looking at the source code for event.lua it looks like you should be able to clear all timers like this:

local event = require("event")
event.timers = {}

Be aware that this might break things relying on timers - I don't believe the default OpenOS shell has any background timers running, though the same might not be true for other scripts.