On 2010-08-11 16:26:58 -0400, bearophile <[email protected]> said:
But if the purpose of a destructor is just to help/speedup the deallocation of a RAM resource (like to nullify the links of a tree to speed up the job of the GC) then in my opinion it is acceptable for this destructor to not run deterministically.
Indeed. So it makes sense to have both a destructor and a finalizer, because the destructor can sometime speed up things for the GC.
I've made a proposal on the related bug report that reads like this: --- For instance, instead of having just destructors, we could have destructors (~this) and finalizers (~~this). A struct with neither can go anywhere, a struct with a destructor but no finalizer cannot go on the GC-heap, a struct with only a finalizer can go anywhere (the finalizer is used as the destructor), and a struct with both can go anywhere. The finalizer cannot be made @safe. Doing this with structs would probably mean allowing only finalizers (~~this) for classes, which according to my syntax suggestion would break existing code for class destructors. Perhaps the syntax should be different. --- <http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4621#c6> -- Michel Fortin [email protected] http://michelf.com/
