Destructor nonsense on dlang.org

[Alex Rønne Petersen]

On 24-05-2012 15:38, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On Thu, 24 May 2012 08:54:45 -0400, Peter Alexander
> <peter.alexander.au at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thursday, 24 May 2012 at 12:21:02 UTC, Alex Rønne Petersen wrote:
>>> 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'm pretty sure it's the same in Java.
>>
>> Finalizers (a.k.a. class destructors) are practically useless.
>
>  From Java spec:
>
> "The Java programming language does not specify how soon a finalizer
> will be invoked, except to say that it will happen before the storage
> for the object is reused"
>
> So yeah, there is no guarantee when a finalizer will be invoked.
>
> However, I'd tend to believe Java implementations will attempt to invoke
> all finalizers of objects left on the heap at program shutdown.
>
> I think D is the same too, as long as termination is normal (i.e. not
> from throwing an Error).


This shouldn't just be an implementation detail IMO. It should be a 
documented feature.

>
> -Steve

-- 
Alex Rønne Petersen
alex at lycus.org
http://lycus.org