Guaranteed finalization support
by Leandro Lucarella on 2009- 04- 19 17:03 (updated on 2009- 04- 19 17:03)- with 0 comment(s)
There was some discussion going on about what I found in my previous post. Unfortunately the discussion diverged a lot, and lots of people seems to defend not guaranteed finalization for no reason, or arguing that finalization is supposed to be used with RAII.
I find all the arguments very weak, at least for convincing me that the current specs are not broken (if finalizers shouldn't be used with objects with its lifetime determined by the GC, then don't let that happen).
The current specs allow a D implementation with a GC that don't call finalizers for collected objects at all! So any D program relying on that is actually broken.
Anyways, from all the possible solutions to this problem, I think the better is just to provide guaranteed finalization, at least at program exit. That is doable (and easily doable by the way).
I filed a bug report about this, but unfortunately, seeing how the discussion at the news group went, I'm very skeptic about this being fixed at all.