[gclist] Timeliness of finalization

[stuart]

Hans-Juergen Boehm wrote:
> On Mar 28,  3:26pm, Charles Fiterman wrote:
> > Finalizers must be "sure" to protect encapsulation.
> 
> If you mean that they should run at process exit, then I disagree.  
> Most resources should be released by the OS.  Otherwise it's not 
> robust against crashed processes.  

This assumes that the garbage collected program isn't the OS itself,
in which case Charles is correct.

The talk about JavaOS is evidence that garbage collection is moving
into low-level systems, and it seems not unlikely that we'll soon
see 'real' kernels which use garbage collection internally. Such
kernels must leave hardware (disks etc) in consistent states even
in the face of crashes.

Such a system might even be able to handle the case where a subsystem
throws an uncaught exception (caused by a hardware error or similar),
and other subsystems NEED to have their finalisers invoked.

stuart


-- 
         stuart yeates <stuart@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz> aka `loam'
                  you are a child of the kernel space 
            no less than the daemons and the device drivers,
                   you have a right to execute here.