From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2008-09-15T05:33:31+09:00
Subject: Re: Garbage collecting threads?

On Sunday 14 September 2008 15:22:53 Robert Klemme wrote:

> There is no hook in Ruby that is called when the scope of a variable 
> ends.  An object without any references can be garbage collected.  But a 
> finalizer won't work because then the object is gone already.

What is a "finalizer" in this context?

> Also, the  
> queue that connects farmer and workers will still have references even 
> if the farmer is gone, so the finalizer will never be called...

Is it possible to have weak references in Ruby?

> > So, it sounds like you're telling me all the "usual" ways of doing this.
> 
> What's wrong with using the usual ways?

The usual ways still force me to explicitly clean up after my worker threads. 
This is irritating, philosophically -- if I wanted to do manual resource 
management, I'd write C++, not Ruby.

It also means that if I'm implementing any kind of library on top of that, I 
have to force all my users to do the same manual cleanup.