I played around a little and figured out, that destructors in D
work quite similarily to destructors in C++. They are invoked,
after the members of the instance being destructed have been
destroyed themselfes (or at least have been brought into an
invalid state). Therefore, these members cannot be accessed
savely from inside the destructor.
In contrast, Java and C# offer a concept called finalizer. When
the finalizer is called, all members of the instance itself are
still valid and are guaranteed to be freely accessible. This
behaviour can be useful for some cleanup operations.
Managed C++ offers both, C#-like finalizers and conventional C++
destructors, where the destructor is called ~className and the
finalizer is called !className. Is their a best practice to
mimikry this behaviour, i.e. to call a certain block of code when
an object is being garbage collected, but before its contents
render invalid?
Any hints would be greatly appreciated.
