D 2015/2016 Vision?

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 8 October 2015 at 15:51:44 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> So I don't think there are _good_ reasons to call 
> finalizers/destructors on the GC heap, it's a sign of a bad 
> model where the responsibilities are unclear. GC objects should 
> only "own" memory on the GC heap.

As far as I can tell, finalizers are for when you either really 
don't care when a non-GC resource gets cleaned up (which is 
probably a bad design in any program that isn't fairly small) or 
for cleaning up after you screw-up and you forget to call the 
appropriate function on the object to tell it to free those 
resources (be it call dispose or something else). In general, 
finalizers are a sign of a problem. If all you have is the GC 
heap, or if you need to be able to put an object that needs to 
clean-up a non-GC resource inside of an object on the GC heap, 
then you're kind of stuck, in which case, you do manual resource 
cleanup and have a finalizer as backup, but it's definitely a 
bandaid rather than an ideal solution. The potential need for 
finalizers is definitely a con to dealing with a GC.

- Jonathan M Davis