[gclist] Finalization and death notices

[Boehm, Hans]

> From: Greg Colvin [mailto:gcolvin@us.oracle.com]
> 
> From: Boehm, Hans <hans_boehm@hp.com>
> > I think that some of what we're really talking about here 
> is the choice
> > between three alternatives:
> > 
> > 1) The collector directly runs finalizers from whichever 
> thread happened to
> > allocate and invoke the collector.  This is common in early Java
> > implementations, but fundamentally broken.  It leads to intermittent
> > deadlocks and/or multiple threads in the same monitor.  
> Let's ignore this
> > alternative.  (Such a facility can sometimes be used to implement a
> > reasonable one.  But if it's there it shouldn't be exposed 
> to the user.)
> 
> Is this approach broken if it is done immediately after the last
> pointer to an object goes away, as with reference counting?
> 
Yes.  See http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/det_destr.html .

It breaks whenever the finalizer needs to acquire a lock that may be held
during a pointer assignment.  (Or when it should logically hold such a
lock.)  That's likely to happen whenever a finalizer updates a global
user-level data structure.  

Hans