From: Saynatkari <ruby-ml@...>
Date: 2005-04-13T03:12:33+09:00
Subject: Re: ability to run finalizers at a given point of a program?

Guillaume Cottenceau wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm considering the possibility to run the finalizers at a given point
> of a program. I have written the following program, and I'm
> experiencing the following unexpected behaviour: I call GC.start in
> the hope that finalizers of unscoped objects that have one will be
> run, but it seems they aren't.

If you really want to somehow 'delete' the objects (rather than just
free some memory) at a certain point, you might want to use ensure.
It works 'outside' exception handling, too.

def foo()
   # Something

   ensure
     # Finalize
end

> http://www.zarb.org/~gc/t/prog/destructor/nodestructor.rb
> 
> I have written the following program in ocaml, which has a closer GC
> implementation than perl or python (these have reference counting,
> ocaml doesn't) and it seems that contrary to Ruby, finalizers are run
> as expected when a GC run is forced (however, when the closure used as
> finalizer has a reference to anything inside the object, this counts
> as a reference thus object is always scoped, so this is not really
> useful as a finalizer/destructor anyway).
> 
> http://www.zarb.org/~gc/t/prog/destructor/destructor.ml
> 
> Do you guys have any insight with ruby behaviour? I use 1.8.2 on Linux.

E