Re: [DotGNU]Resource management

[Rhys Weatherley]

Bill Lance wrote:

> Would this be of any interest to the developers here?
>
> http://discuss.develop.com/archives/wa.exe?A2=ind0010A&L=DOTNET&P=R28572

The article is pretty old: October 2000.

Some background for the DotGNU folks may be useful.
Since the first release of Microsoft's .NET framework,
there has been an unholy war going on in the Windows
developer world over garbage collection.

The VB and C++ programmers hate it.  Hate it, hate it,
hate it!  Every 2-3 days, someone stands up on the
DOTNET list and yells "you must implement destructors
properly!" when they discover that the GC didn't free
an object when the programmer thought that it should.

The referenced article discusses why it is just too hard
to implement "deterministic finalization" without adding
a huge number of other problems.  And it suggests some
new C# syntax to help address the problem of resource
management.  This syntax has since been added to the
C# standard, and will be supported by Portable.NET.

The article is a good primer on why the GC is necessary
in .NET.

The GC vs no-GC debate happened in the Java world
5-6 years ago.  Eventually most programmers learnt
to write their cleanup code slightly different and that
was the end of it.  The Windows world is still learning.

Cheers,

Rhys.