RFC: Proposal: Deterministic Object Destruction

[ooomzay at gmail.com]

On Friday, March 2, 2018 at 4:35:41 AM UTC, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Thu, 01 Mar 2018 16:26:47 -0800, ooomzay wrote:
> 
> >> >> When does the destination file get closed?
> >> >
> >> > When you execute:-
> >> >
> >> >    del dst
> >> >
> >> > or:-
> >> >
> >> >    dst = something_else
> >> 
> >> What if you don't?
> > 
> > Then the resource will remain open until your script exits at which
> > point it is probably not very well defined exactly when or even if the
> > destructor/__del__ will be called.
> > 
> > I.e. Don't do this! Did you have some realistic case in mind or are you
> > just probing the behaviour?
> 
> 
> If you're going to *require* the programmer to explicitly del the 
> reference:
>
>     f = open("file")
>     text = f.read()
>     del f

But I am not! On the contrary RAII frees the programmer from even having to remember to close the file. The poster asked what would happen if the resource was deliberately kept open by storing a reference at global scope. 

In practice CPython destroys it cleanly on exit - but I am not sure the language guarantees this - in any case RAII won't make things any worse in this respect. (Logfiles are a common example of such global resource.)

> then you might as well require them to explicitly close the file:
> 
>     f = open("file")
>     text = f.read()
>     f.close()
> 
> which we know from many years experience is not satisfactory except for 
> the simplest scripts that don't need to care about resource management.
> That's the fatal flaw in RAII: 

We must be discussing a different RAII. That is the raison d'etre of RAII: RAII directly addresses this problem in an exception-safe way that does not burden the resource user at all.

> the problem is that the lifespan of the resource may 
> not be the same as the lifetime of the object. 
>
> Especially for files, the 
> problem is that the lifespan of resource (the time you are actually using 
> it) may be significantly less than the lifespan of the object holding 
> onto that resource. Since there's no way for the interpreter to know 
> whether or not you have finished with the resource, you have a choice:
> 
> - close the resource yourself (either explicitly with file.close(), 
>   or implicitly with a context manager);
> 
> - or keep the resource open indefinitely, until such eventual time
>   that the object is garbage collected and the resource closed.

Hence my PEP! It enables RAII. The interpreter merely has to call __del__ as soon as the object is no longer referenced (as does CPYthon).