On Tuesday, 8 November 2016 at 06:04:59 UTC, thedeemon wrote:
On Tuesday, 8 November 2016 at 05:36:22 UTC, Era Scarecrow wrote:

Hmmm.. I had the impression that if something was referenced by another object, then it couldn't be collected,

Another *live* object, I.e. reachable from globals and stack. If you have a big tree and it becomes unreachable (you only had a pointer to its root and you nulled it), then this whole tree becomes garbage, and its nodes and leafs will be collected in unpredictable order, with destructors being run in unpredictable order, even when these dead nodes reference each other.

And I can't help but hope it would start at the largest/base object and work it's way up. Or the largest object and then work it's way down. Alright...

Shouldn't for warnings then in the destructor about accessing arrays, class objects or other allocated items that they might not even exist anymore?

If I think of it like making a class/struct that does compression and the blob that manages tracking the compressed data uses simple array appending, and then the struct or class notices it's thrown away and it has an active connection to save it's contents to a file, as part of the destructor I'd probably write it so it would save and flush what data was left before deallocating everything or closing the file descriptors. With this you might have to manage your own memory to ensure the GC doesn't accidentally remove important data first...

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