On Wed, Jan 01, 2003 at 08:09:05PM -0800, Steve Fink wrote: > To anyone out there who is thinking of a Grand Unified Infant > Mortality Solution, here's another thing that vastly complicates > things, and that we don't yet have a workable solution for yet: prompt > finalization.
Timely finalization has no perfect solution even under the best conditions (compiler support. etc.), this is why Java and .NET offer no promises about timely finalization. . . > The connection to the infant mortality problem is just that some > solutions might make this easier. Or harder. For example, the current > conservative stackwalk breaks even the painfully slow solution: there As long as you're using a tracing collector, you cannot provide a general guarantee of timely finalization without running a full sweep of the 'heap'. Even if you do not have to walk the hardware stack that's too costly to be practical. The best partial solution to early finalization is compile-time tracing of possible references by the compiler which can explicitly generate the appropriate DESTROY calls. -- Jason
