This is actually remarkably complicated; the short answer, regarding the activity still being alive, is yes and no. Providing you have cleaned up the resources for your Activity correctly, your activity will be cleaned up (eventually) by the garbage collector. Regarding cleanup, it’s import to know that Xamarin discourages (slide 44 onwards) using finalizers. Here’s … Read more
I found out from the CLR team themselves that indeed it is not safe — unless you allocate a GCHandle on the RCW while it’s still safe to do so (when you first acquire the RCW). This ensures that the GC and finalizer haven’t totaled the RCW before the managed object that needs to invoke … Read more
Because of the way the garbage collector works. For performance, most Java GCs use a copying collector, where short-lived objects are allocated into an “eden” block of memory, and when the it’s time for that generation of objects to be collected, the GC just needs to copy the objects that are still “alive” to a … Read more
I’m going out on a limb here, but… most people don’t need the full-blown dispose pattern. It’s designed to be solid in the face of having direct access to unmanaged resources (usually via IntPtr) and in the face of inheritance. Most of the time, neither of these is actually required. If you’re just holding a … Read more
The object is not garbage collected. This is know as “Object resurrection”. You must be careful with that, once the finalizer is called the gc won’t call it again, on some enviroments like .NET you can re-register the finalizer but i’m not sure about java
Objects with finalizers cannot be collected within a single garbage collection procedure. Such objects are moved to f-reachable queue, and remain there until finalizers are called. Only after that they can be garbage-collected. Following code is better, but you should not rely on it anyway: GC.Collect(); GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers(); GC.Collect(); Also, throwing exceptions in finalizer seems too … Read more
Ok, it’s known that GC implicitly calls Finalize methods on objects when it identifies that object as garbage. No no no. That is not known because in order to be knowledge a statement must be true. That statement is false. The garbage collector does not run finalizers as it traces, whether it runs itself or … Read more
It does for C# (see code below) but not for C++. using System; class Test { Test() { throw new Exception(); } ~Test() { Console.WriteLine(“Finalized”); } static void Main() { try { new Test(); } catch {} GC.Collect(); GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers(); } } This prints “Finalized”
Although the question was asking about the Object.finalize method, the subject really is about the finalization mechanism as a whole. This mechanism includes not only the surface API Object.finalize, but it also includes specifications of the programming language about the life cycle of objects, and practical impact on garbage collector implementations in JVMs. Much has … Read more
Finalizers may actually be never executed, as Raymond Chen explains. Kind of funny that this question is asked during his annual CLR week, just two days after he explained it 🙂 For the lazy ones, the (or rather, one) conclusion is: A correctly-written program cannot assume that finalizers will ever run. If you are wondering … Read more