> On Mar 11, 2017, at 1:56 PM, Hans Boehm <hbo...@google.com> wrote: > Stepping back, I'm a little surprised at the deprecation. In my opinion, > the problems with finalizers are, in rough order of significance:
I think an important difference between finalize and other j.l.r.Reference-based cleanups that hasn't been mentioned is that finalization is not cancellable. If one creates creates a finalizable object and explicitly "closes" it when done with it, there is no way to avoid the later finalization processing that will ultimately be a very expensive nop. For an example of this problem, see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HDFS-8562 Extending finalization as suggested there seems to me to be feature creep on a facility that we already heavily denigrate and would prefer didn't exist.
