Automatic Resource Management and Simple Resource Clean-up

[Thorsten van Ellen]

Josh, Neal and Roger!

I have had this idea also for a long time. I think it is in a "tradition" of 
java of suppressing typical programming errors. A good example for the tradition 
is automatic memory management and garbage collection that is a very complex 
mechanism to avoid one very typical programming error.

Management of resources other than memory usually is really as buggy as memory 
management. My observation is that resource management is one of the most 
frequent bug pattern I know of. Look at any project: you hardly find correct 
optimal implemented examples and you nearly always find bugs in every non 
trivial project. Analysing/finding the bug often is very difficult like finding 
memory management bugs.

It seems to me, the feature benefit is worth some more effort. The effort of 
thinking a bit more about it might be not too much, especially if your heading 
toward a "minimal" solution like "simple clean up", but I don't know what is 
"affordable" in jdk7-schedule.

Just to put in some additional/new ideas and to "make the cake bigger" before it 
is reduced to the optimal solution ("brain-storming", sometimes thinkind around 
a corner helps):

Both proposed solutions might have problems with resource management, that is 
distributed/shared/spread between two or more separated methods. Such problems 
might be solved with a kind of GOF-"pattern", interfaces and a tiny "resource 
management library".

And there exist even more complicated resource management problems like ACID 
database transactions that do not only have one "close"-operation but two 
(commit and rollback) and a more complex decision process between those.

But regarding these additional ideas may also be counterproductive for a tiny 
language modification that solves 98 % of the typical bugs and therefore may 
also be ignored!

Best regards

Thorsten van Ellen