From: Paul Brannan <pbrannan@...>
Date: 2003-12-14T06:16:43+09:00
Subject: Re: How to unit test finalizers?

On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 11:57:04PM +0900, Simon Strandgaard wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Dec 2003 23:43:43 +0900, Paul Brannan wrote:
> > While it is your responsibility to call the finalizers, it is our
> > responsibility to make sure that there are no references to the object
> > hanging around keeping the object from being finalized.  I don't know of
> > any good, portable way to unit test that, though.
> 
> Wouldn't it be possible to spawn a child process, where a instance outputs
> something when it gets finalized.
> Then the parent process could do a  assert_equal(count_open, count_close)

This only guarantees that the finalizer was registered properly with the
garbage collector.  It's still possible to have a bug that keeps the
object from being garbage collected until Ruby exits.

Paul