On Wednesday, 7 October 2015 at 13:15:11 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
On Wednesday, 7 October 2015 at 12:56:32 UTC, bitwise wrote:
On Wednesday, 7 October 2015 at 07:24:03 UTC, Paulo Pinto
wrote:
On Tuesday, 6 October 2015 at 20:43:42 UTC, bitwise wrote:
[...]
That no, but this yes (at least in C#):
using (LevelManager mgr = new LevelManager())
{
//....
// Somewhere in the call stack
Texture text = mgr.getTexture();
}
--> All level resources gone that require manual management
gone
--> Ask the GC to collect the remaining memory right now
If not level wide, than maybe scene/section wide.
However I do get that not all architectures are amendable to
be re-written in a GC friendly way.
But the approach is similar to RAII in C++, reduce new to
minimum and allocate via factory functions that work together
with handle manager classes.
--
Paulo
Still no ;)
It's a Texture. It's meant to be seen on the screen for a
while, not destroyed in the same scope which it was created.
In games though, we have a scene graph. When things happen, we
often chip off a large part of it while the game is running,
discard it, and load something new. We need to know that what
we just discarded has been destroyed completely before we
start loading new stuff when we're heavily constrained by
memory. And even in cases where we aren't that constrained by
memory, we need to know things have been destroyed, period,
for non-memory resources. Also, when using graphics APIs like
OpenGL, we need control over which thread an object is
destroyed in, because you can't access OpenGL resources from
just any thread. Now, you could set up some complicated queue
where you send textures and so on to(latently) be destroyed,
but this is just complicated. Picture a Hello OpenGL app in D
and the hoops some noob would have to jump through. It's bad
news.
Also, I should add, that a better example of the Texture thing
would be a regular Texture and a RenderTexture. You can only
draw to the RenderTexture, but you should be able to apply
both to a primitive for drawing. You need polymorphism for
this. A struct will not do.
Bit
I guess you misunderstood the // Somewhere in the call stack
It is meant as the logical region where that scene graph block
you refer to is valid.
Anyway I was just explaining what is possible when one embraces
the tools GC languages offer.
I still don't think your example exists in real world
applications. Typically, you don't have that kind of control over
the application's control-flow. You don't really have the option
of unwinding the stack when you want to clean up. Most
applications these days are event-based. When things are loaded
or unloaded, it's usually as a result of some event-callback
originating from either an input event, or a display link
callback. To clarify, on iOS, you don't have a game loop. You can
register a display-link or timer which will call your 'draw' or
'update' function at a fixed interval. On top of this, you just
can't rely on a strict hierarchical ownership of resources like
this. large bundles of resources may be loaded/unloaded in any
order, at any time.
And both Java and .NET do offer support such type of queues as
well.
I was actually thinking about this.
If D had a standard runloop of some sort(like
NSRunLoop/performSelectorOnThread: for iOS/OSX) then it would
make queueing things to other threads a little easier. I suppose
D's receive() API could be used to make something a little more
specialized. But although this would allow classes to delegate
the destruction of resources to the correct thread, it wouldn't
resolve the problem that those destruction commands will still
only be delegated if/when a classes destructor is actually called.
In general, I advocate any form of automatic memory/resource
management.
+1 :)
