On 3/16/2012 11:39, Warp wrote:
>    I think that the idea was that RAM is not the only resource that an
> object could own, and having to manually free such resource is error-prone
> and going back to the days of C programming.

Right. In a GCed operating system, why would you own anything other than 
GCed resources? You don't need file handles. You don't need IPC ports. You 
don't need window handles. Etc. Look at Smalltalk - nothing had finalizers, 
because it had its own OS. Or Hermes. Or Eros. (Eros and Hermes, for 
example, treats all your disk space as just one big virtual memory address 
space. There's no files. You just store data in your variables, and serve 
them over IPC ports.)

About the only thing you'd need is some way of closing a socket when the 
connection got GCed, in which case you could have a process that closes the 
socket when its local IPC connections all get closed, and you just talk 
through that process. That's basically how Erlang manages it.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   People tell me I am the counter-example.

Post a reply to this message