Destructor nonsense on dlang.org

[David Nadlinger]

On Thursday, 24 May 2012 at 17:55:02 UTC, Alex Rønne Petersen 
wrote:
> I would strongly advise against that, because a missed clear() 
> means your finalizer may be run by the runtime's finalization 
> machinery, and thus invalidate any invariants you were relying 
> on in the finalizer.

Yes – the »correct« way to handle situations where you need 
deterministic finalization is to use structs on the stack, 
possibly in conjunction with reference counting. Of course, there 
are some situations (e.g. when there are cycles) where this 
doesn't work, but at least it covers most of the »external 
non-memory resource« cases.

Composability can still be a problem, though, because holding a 
reference in a (GC-managed) class object might leave you with 
exactly the same problem you tried to avoid in the first place.

David