== Quote from grauzone (n...@example.net)'s article > Rioshin an'Harthen wrote: > > "Leandro Lucarella" <llu...@gmail.com> kirjoitti viestissä > > news:20090411030416.ga22...@homero.springfield.home... > >> BTW, is there any real interest in adding some more power to the GC > >> implementator to allow some kind of moving or generational collector? > > > > What I mostly want/need from the GC would be determinism. I want to be > > able to call delete on a subobject in the destructor of the object being > > deleted. > > > > How many times have I stumbled on this already? > Actually, this isn't needed: > - if you want to manually free an object, you can add an extra destroy() > method > - when the object is garbage collected, there's no point in deleting > referenced objects, because these are either still alive, or get > collected as well
In theory true, but in practice false. If you have a huge array owned by a small class, the huge array can be retained due to false pointers. Before I realized that it's illegal, I used to put delete statements in destructors in these kinds of situations and it seemed to work in practice even though it's illegal according to the spec, although I never tested it rigorously or really thought about how it could break.
