[MLton-devel] finalization

[Henry Cejtin]

The  one  problem  with  my notion of waitForGC is that currently there is no
context switching notion (or ready queue) built in to the  compiler,  and  as
Matthew  says, you need something to help you here.  A problem, I think, with
something like  installAfterGC  is  that  it  makes  it  a  bit  harder  (not
impossible  certainly)  to  implement things like critical sections where you
don't want any finalizers to be called.  Mind you, it isn't easy to  do  this
with waitForGC either, but it seems a bit cleaner.

Any  way,  it  is  just  a  thought since as I said, the notion of finalizers
running in a separate thread seems to be the right one to me, and it  doesn't
look  like  a  big  change  to  the  runtime  system, and would give us fully
automatic finalizers.

Maybe Matthew's installAfterGC is the way to go, but then you would  need  to
have some kind of hook to delay the finalization.  If `user code' implemented
its own stuff using installAfterGC, then all is well, but if we add finalized
objects  to the `system', then code which needed to do this would have to not
use ours and modify the code.  I.e., it is the kind of thing  that  in  Emacs
would use a few hook functions some where.  (Yuck.)

I think that the exact notion and semantics aren't quite there yet.


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