How Erlang atoms can be garbage collected

Question

It is said that atoms are not garbage collected. Once you’ve created an atom, it remains in the atom table, which might cause memory leakage at the end of the day!

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Answer 1

While I'm not sure atoms are garbage-collected, you can easily do without worrying whether you will blow up the system's memory. As @Chiron said, as long as all your atoms are known at compile time you should be ok.

What if I really need to use list_to_atom/1 somehow? Well, you may be able to twist your issue using this kind of function:

atom("apple") -> apple;
atom("orange") -> orange;
atom("banana") -> banana.

One other workaround is list_to_existing_atom/1

But the VM can still eat more and more RAM: other connected Erlang nodes may register atoms globally, that is allocate atoms at run time.