Destructor nonsense on dlang.org

[Michel Fortin]

On 2012-05-24 12:21:01 +0000, Alex Rønne Petersen <alex at lycus.org> said:

> Hi,
> 
> http://dlang.org/class.html#Destructor
> 
> "The garbage collector is not guaranteed to run the destructor for all 
> unreferenced objects."
> 
> What the *hell*? So resources are allowed to arbitrarily leak and the 
> programmer has to actually expect this to happen?
> 
> I really, really hope that this is a documentation error or early 
> design decision that has since been rectified but with lack of 
> documentation updates.

I think it means that objects not collected when the program terminates 
will never be, and thus the destructor will not be called.

There's also the issue of false pointers that can prevent some objects 
from being collected.

More generally, you can't really count on the destructor being called 
because the GC is free to decide when to recycle memory. An 
implementation that never collects and always allocate new memory is a 
perfectly valid GC implementation, even though it might not be very 
practical in most cases.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/