Re: Garbage collection (was Re: JWZ on s/Java/Perl/)

[Alan Burlison]

Branden wrote:

> Just set autoflush, if you're lazy...

And say goodbye to performance...

> > The problem is
> > that you can not only count on $fh's DESTROY being called at the end of
> > the block, you often can't count on it ever happening.
> 
> Anyway, the file would be flushed and closed...

That's not sufficient.  Without deterministic finalisation, what does
the folowing do?

  {
    my $fh = IO::File->new("file");
    print $fh "foo\n";
  }
  {
    my $fh = IO::File->new("file");
    print $fh "bar\n";
  }

At present "file" will contain "foo\nbar\n".  Without DF it could just
as well be "bar\nfoo\n".  Make no mistake, this is a major change to the
semantics of perl.

Alan Burlison