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In c# you can implement IDisposable. The garbage collector will call a dispose method allowing you piggyback on the garbage collector for just about anything.

In c# you can implement IDisposable. The garbage collector will call a dispose method allowing you piggyback on the garbage collector for just about anything. But it's rarely a good idea to piggyback. Most resources are much more limited or time sensitive than memory. So you should free them immediately. Even when your resource -is- memory it sometimes is a very very very bad idea to free via garbage collection.

ErotemeObelus 7y ago
What is even the point of garbage collection? By the time you manage all the resources of a 100k line application you're going to have to do as much work as if you wrote it in C.
- jarjarbinks455 7y ago
  Well the point of gc is to allow the algorithm to focus on the problem domain. and not worry about mechanical implementation details of a computer. Everything has a trade off. An obvious win still must pay a cost elsewhere. In the case of GC it's simply not a good trade off for many resources. Sometimes it cannot be used even if you were willing to accept a trade.
  - ErotemeObelus 7y ago
    Managing resources by hand is managing the mechanical implementation details of a computer. So in order to have garbage collection that manages more than just a sliver of memory so small that it counts as a rounding error by the same you get to the size of real world projects, you need a custom operating system and possibly even custom hardware too.
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      Your statement is false for many real world projects. (For some, you are correct. Those projects should not be written in a garbage-collected language, or should be written to run on a custom OS and custom hardware.)
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
  When GC'd objects represent resources like open connections and files, use-after-free safely and reliably raises an exception to handle. Without GC, use-after-free on pretty much any object is so catastrophic that even correct code starts doing unpredictable things.

ErotemeObelus 7y ago

What is even the point of garbage collection? By the time you manage all the resources of a 100k line application you're going to have to do as much work as if you wrote it in C.

jarjarbinks455 7y ago
Well the point of gc is to allow the algorithm to focus on the problem domain. and not worry about mechanical implementation details of a computer. Everything has a trade off. An obvious win still must pay a cost elsewhere. In the case of GC it's simply not a good trade off for many resources. Sometimes it cannot be used even if you were willing to accept a trade.
- ErotemeObelus 7y ago
  Managing resources by hand is managing the mechanical implementation details of a computer. So in order to have garbage collection that manages more than just a sliver of memory so small that it counts as a rounding error by the same you get to the size of real world projects, you need a custom operating system and possibly even custom hardware too.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Your statement is false for many real world projects. (For some, you are correct. Those projects should not be written in a garbage-collected language, or should be written to run on a custom OS and custom hardware.)
erik_seaberg 7y ago
When GC'd objects represent resources like open connections and files, use-after-free safely and reliably raises an exception to handle. Without GC, use-after-free on pretty much any object is so catastrophic that even correct code starts doing unpredictable things.