Invoke garbage collector?

[Johannes Pfau]

Sean Eskapp wrote:
>I'm having an unfortunate DSFML issue, where failing to free objects
>like Images or Sprites causes exceptions to eventually be thrown.
>Calling the built-in member dispose() causes access violations, so I
>assume it's not for programmer use.
>
>However, I need the resources to be freed more quickly than the GC is
>apparently doing (I assume the Images and Sprites are eventually
>cleaned up), so is there a way to invoke a GC cleanup in some way?

I don't think that invoking the garbage collector is a good solution in
this case. "dispose" is indeed defined as "protected", so you probably
should not call it manually, but then there really should be a public
dispose like function. The reason for the crashes when calling
dispose manually is simple: dispose calls a c sfml function to release c
resources. The destructor calls dispose again, dispose tries to free an
invalid pointer -> crash. So what should probably be done is to define a
private m_disposed member and only call dispose if it hasn't been called
before. Try to add this code to the DSFMLObject class in
dsfml/system/common.d:

-------------------------------------
private:
    bool m_disposed = false;

public:
    final void releaseRessources() //Needs a better name, though
    {
        if(m_disposed)
            return;
        dispose();
        m_disposed = true;
    }
-------------------------------------

And change dispose() in the DSFmLObject ~this() to releaseRessources();

(Crashes might still occur if dispose is called directly. In the end,
this might need a little more thinking, but that's up to the DSFML
authors ;-))
-- 
Johannes Pfau
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