On 2010-08-12 16:08:17 -0400, Don <[email protected]> said:
That's the only example of an nearly unlimited resource which I've
heard thus far, but that raises the question, why the hell would you be
using malloc if you're not going to free it, when you have a language
with a gc? Effectively, the gc is freeing your malloced memory.
I can think of a couple of reasons for using malloc, but finalisers
aren't a good solution to any of them.
For one thing, you could ask Andrei why he based std.containers.Array
on malloc/free with a reference counter. Not being able to use Array as
a member of a class would be quite drastic.
Hypothesis: if a finalizer is run, where it actually DOES something (as
opposed to, for example, running a pile of asserts), there's always a
bug.
It's an extreme hypothesis, so it should be really easy to disprove.
Can you come up with a counterexample?
Here is a real-world example: the D/Objective-C bridge use a class
destructor/finalizer to release the Objective-C counterpart of a
wrapper (by calling the release method on the Objective-C object). The
Objective-C object is not something I can allocate with the D GC, and
the D counterpart wouldn't be very usable if it was not managed by the
D GC. So finalization does the cleanup, and that works just fine.
I wonder what QtD does, but it's probably something similar too.
--
Michel Fortin
[email protected]
http://michelf.com/
