garbage collection / cyclic references

[andrew cooke]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> "andrew cooke" <andrew at acooke.org> writes:
>> the two dominant virtual machines - .net and the jvm both handle
>> circular
>> references with no problem whatever.
>
> AFAIK, they also don't guarantee that finalizers ever run, much less
> run in deterministic order.

i think you're right, but i'm missing your point - perhaps there was some
sub-context to the original post that i didn't understand?

finalizers should not be considered part of a public resource management
api - they should not be used to do things like flushing and closing
files, for example.   i think this was a minor "issue" early in java's
adoption (i guess because of incorrect assumptions made by c++
programmers) (in python the with context is a much better mechanism for
this kind of thing - the best java has is the finally statement).  but
it's one of those things that (afaik) isn't an issue once you fully
embrace the language (rather like, say, semantically meaningful
indentation).

but i'm sure you know all that, so i'm still wondering what i've missed.

andrew