The Old New Thing

Everybody thinks about CLR objects the wrong way (well not everybody)

August 10, 2010 Aug 10, 2010 08/10/10

Raymond Chen

Many people responded to Everybody thinks about garbage collection the wrong way by proposing variations on auto-disposal based on scope: "Any local variable that is IDisposable should dispose itself when it goes out of scope." "You should be able to attach an attribute to a class that says the destructor should be called...

When does an object become available for garbage collection?

August 10, 2010 Aug 10, 2010 08/10/10

Raymond Chen

As we saw last time, garbage collection is a method for simulating an infinite amount of memory in a finite amount of memory. This simulation is performed by reclaiming memory once the environment can determine that the program wouldn't notice that the memory was reclaimed. There are a variety of mechanism for determining this. In a basic ...