Re: [Caml-list] Re: Re: exception safety / RAII ?

[Damien Doligez <damien.doligez@inria.fr>]

On Mar 8, 2005, at 23:53, Daniel Yokomizo wrote:

> AFAIK it doesn't force the GC to respect the dependencies. A object is
> garbage if it can't be reached from any root references, it doesn't 
> matter
> if other garbage objects still reference it. So if we have:
>
>
> ROOT -> A -> B -> C
>
> D -> E -> F
>
> G -> B
>
> H -> C
>
>
> the GC can collect any of [D, E, F, G, H], in any order it wants, 
> because
> they're all garbage. An incremental collector could collect first [F, 
> G, H]
> because they are (say) large objects, and don't recycle the memory for 
> [D,
> E] until the next collection.

As far as _collecting_ is concerned, the GC can do it in any order it 
wants,
and the current implementation is likely to do it in order of increasing
addresses (i.e. in some unpredictable order).

> IIUC the current OCaml GC implementation may exhibit such properties 
> (i.e.
> respect dependencies) but it isn't required to do so.

What I did specify and implement for 3.08 is the following:

If you call Gc.finalise on your values in the same order as they are
allocated, and if you don't introduce new depedencies afterward (with
assignments), then the finalisation functions will be called in the
right order (i.e. D before E before F, etc).

On the other hand, it means that a non-terminating finalisation function
must call Gc.finalise_release in order to let the GC run other
finalisation functions.

-- Damien