Destructors vs. Finalizers

[Guillaume Piolat via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 26 July 2017 at 14:10:19 UTC, Moritz Maxeiner wrote:
> AFAICT that was mostly because it would have broken plenty of 
> existing code.

The validity or purposefulness of such code is up to debate, a 
separate debate granted.
Let's assume there is working code that such a change will break.

> Properly separating destruction and finalization from each 
> other with the current syntax remaining as finalizers and the 
> new one for destructors would allow this to be done without 
> major code breakage.

Sure, in the event D would like to transition towards a state 
where the GC doesn't call finalizers, it seems useful.

 From a marketing point of view having two destructors and 
keyword/syntax just for this would be hard to defend, and it 
would also need to explain the whole story.

Personally I'd be for:

     ~this() { /* deterministic one */ }
     void finalize() { /* the one called by GC */ }

But then no transition path.

I'll defend the view point that there is _nothing_ useful to do 
in a finalizer except to check if the destructor has already been 
called.