On Saturday, 27 October 2012 at 01:03:57 UTC, Rob T wrote:
On Friday, 26 October 2012 at 23:10:48 UTC, bearophile wrote:
Rob T:
Is this happening with dmd 2.060 as released?
I'm using 2.061alpha git head, but I guess the situation is
the same with dmd 2.060. The code is linked in my post, so
trying it is easy, it's one small module.
Bye,
bearophile
I tried it with dmd 2.60 (released), and gdc 4.7 branch. I
tried to check if memory was being freed by creating a struc
destructor for JavaMemoryTrade, but that did not work as
expected, leading me down the confusing and inconsistent path
of figuring out why destructors do not get called when memory
is freed.
Long story short, I could not force a struct to execute its
destructor if it was allocated on the heap unless I used
delete. I tried destroy and clear, as well as GC.collect and
GC.free(), nothing else worked.
Memory heap management as well as struct destructors appear to
be seriously broken.
--rt
OK my bad, partially.
Heap allocated struct destructors will not get called using clear
or destroy unless the struct reference is manually dereferenced.
I got confused that class references behave differently than heap
allocated struct references. I cannot be the first person to do
this, and it must happen all the time. The auto dereferencing of
a struc pointer when accessing members may be nice, but it makes
struct pointers look exactly like class references, which will
lead to mistakes.
I do get the concept between classes and structs, but why does
clear and destroy using a struct pointer not give me a compiler
error or at least a warning? Is there any valid purpose to clear
or destroy a pointer that is not dereferenced? Seems like a bug
to me.
--rt
