Cleanup module.children after evaluating

[SevInf]

I've stumbled upon this while trying to debug a memory leak in postcss-loader. It uses cosmiconfig which in turn uses require-from-string to load javascript config. The problem is, Module constructor adds newly created module to parent.children which prevents evaluated values from ever getting garbage collected.

[sudo-suhas]

@SevInf Instead of cleaning up, would it be possible to leverage require.cache?

Here's a simple demo:

'use strict';

const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');
const requireFromString = require('require-from-string');

const file = path.join(__dirname, 'experiment.js');
const code = fs.readFileSync(file, 'utf8');
// var result =
requireFromString(code, file);

console.log(require.cache[__filename])

Output:

Module {
  id: '.',
  exports: {},
  parent: null,
  filename: 'E:\\Projects\\repos\\cosmiconfig\\req-str.js',
  loaded: false,
  children:
   [ Module {
       id: 'E:\\Projects\\repos\\cosmiconfig\\node_modules\\require-from-string\\index.js',
       exports: [Function: requireFromString],
       parent: [Object],
       filename: 'E:\\Projects\\repos\\cosmiconfig\\node_modules\\require-from-string\\index.js',
       loaded: true,
       children: [],
       paths: [Array] },
     Module {
       id: 'E:\\Projects\\repos\\cosmiconfig\\experiment.js',
       exports: 1,
       parent: [Object],
       filename: 'E:\\Projects\\repos\\cosmiconfig\\experiment.js',
       loaded: false,
       children: [],
       paths: [Array] } ],
  paths:
   [ 'E:\\Projects\\repos\\cosmiconfig\\node_modules',
     'E:\\Projects\\repos\\node_modules',
     'E:\\Projects\\node_modules',
     'E:\\node_modules' ] }

[floatdrop]

@SevInf agreed, module parents should be cleaned up and gc should only keep exports if they are around.