On Tuesday, 27 June 2017 at 10:14:16 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Tuesday, June 27, 2017 09:54:19 John Burton via
Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
[...]
Arguably, std.socket should have used structs instead of
classes for sockets for precisely this reason (though there are
some advantages in using inheritance with sockets). But yes,
calling close manually is the correct thing to do. Relying on
the GC to call a destructor/finalizer is error-prone. There is
no guarantee that the memory will ever be freed (e.g. the
runtime could choose to not bother doing cleanup on shutdown),
and even if the GC does collect it, there are no guarantees
about how soon it will do so. However, if you keep allocating
memory with the GC, then over time, the GC will collect
GC-allocated memory that isn't currently being used so that it
can reuse the memory. So, you really don't need to worry about
the memory unless it becomes a bottleneck. It will be collected
and reused, not leaked.
[...]
I agree with that it should have been structs. The inheritance
issue could be fixed by having a private member of the struct in
a class, that way there could still be a class wrapper around it.
