The key point is that finalize() is not reliable, so you shouldn't depend on it. The correct idiom is more or less myResource = foo(); try { ... } f

The key point is that finalize() is not reliable, so you shouldn't depend on it. The correct idiom is more or less myResource = foo(); try { ... } finally { myResource.release(); } Some programmers (although I've never met one) try to avoid this boilerplate by writing a finalize() method on myResource that releases it. It's an anti-pattern. C# and Java have syntactic sugar now that makes the boilerplate shorter, which should help.