GC and dtors ~ a different approach?

[Sean Kelly]

kris wrote:
> Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>> kris wrote:
>> All of those pros you mention are valid. But you'd have one serious con:
>> * Any class which required cleanup would have to be manually memory 
>> managed.
> 
> Can anyone come up with some examples whereby a class needs to cleanup, 
> and also /needs/ to be collected lazily? In other words, where raii or 
> delete could not be applied appropriately?

Well, there are plenty of instances where the lifetime of an object 
isn't bound to a specific owner or scope--consider connection objects 
for a server app.  However, in most cases it's possible (and correct) to 
delegate cleanup responsibility to a specific manager object or to link 
it to the occurrence of some specific event.  So far as 
non-deterministic cleanup via dtors is concerned, I think it's mostly 
implemented as a fail-safe.  And it may be more correct to signal an 
error if such an object is encountered via a GC run than to simply clean 
it up silently, as a careful programmer might consider this a resource leak.


Sean