On Jun 6, 2015, at 11:02 AM, Peter Levart <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I understand that it would be desirable for a finalizable object to be made
> "untracked" as soon as it is manually cleaned-up. This would most certainly
> give a relief to GC as it could reclaim such untracked objects immediately
> like normal objects without pushing them through all the finalization steps.
>
> Such feature would need new API. Here's my take on such API incorporated in
> my prototype. This feature is mostly independent of other changes in the
> prototype and could be provided stand-alone. I choose to incorporate it into
> the prototype to compare it's overhead with classical finalization in
> unchanged and changed JDKs:
>
>
> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~plevart/misc/JEP132/ReferenceHandling/webrev.03/
While changes are needed to do this sort of thing, it seems to me a better
change would be to not use finalize() at all, but instead use
PhantomReference-based cleanup. It provides exactly that kind of behavior, and
has other benefits besides.
There is some discussion about doing exactly that for File{Input,Output}Stream
(see https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8080225).
