On 10/10/13 18:14, David Barrett-Kahn wrote:
On GC being a source of cross-browser difficulty: I think you can fix that
by stating in the messageport spec when we guarantee to implicitly close
the connection (when its host page closes) and when we provide no
guarantees (when it loses all its references).
On people relying on GC timing: Those people are being silly and deserve
what they get, as they do in Java. Using destructors in that language is
very nearly always a bad idea, but they still put them there and it was
fine.
The problem is that it's not perceived as the fault of the page author,
but as the fault of the browser in which the page fails to work (which
may indeed be a browser in which it previously did work and that then
happened to upgrade its GC implementation).
The difference between the web and Java is that with Java you can
mandate a particular version of a particular implementation, even if it
is considered ugly to do so. With the web that isn't possible.
