I would suggest that you only register a finalizer for objects where you *do* have responsibility to reclaim them. There are no implicit finalizers registered for any subclasses of ExternalObject by default - the only thing that happens is that all handles are cleared when the image is restarted. Cheers, - Andreas On 4/2/2010 5:17 PM, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote:
Hello all,
Suppose I have a pointer to a structure and I do or do not have the responsibility of reclaiming the memory when a corresponding ExternalStructure sub-instance is finalized. How do I distinguish the two cases? One idea I had is to explicitly set the handle to nil if I do not own the memory, but (please correct me if I'm wrong), I can't do that while I'm still using the instance because it will presumably use the handle in accessing the fields, right?
Looking at implementors of #isExternalAddress, maybe the idea is to use a byte array to make a copy of memory and an address to refer to it.
What should I be asking? :)
Bill