GC object finalization not guaranteed

[Christopher Wright]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Leandro Lucarella wrote:
>> You missed the point. I'm not talking about freeing the memory. I'm
>> talking about finalizers. A finalizer could send a "bye" packet throgh 
>> the
>> net. That can't be handled by the OS.
> 
> That shouldn't be handled by a finalizer. A "bye" packet can be handled 
> by a static destructor.

That requires more work -- you have to keep track of a bunch of 
instances that are active, and then the static destructor goes through 
all of them and nukes them each in turn. It isn't a whole lot of work, I 
admit. But it is -- or at least, it is perceived as -- an idiom to make 
up for an inadequacy of the garbage collector.

> Finalizers are fairly useless for gc. But they are a lot more useful as 
> RAII destructors.

Then maybe finalizers should be divorced entirely from garbage collection.