Time to retire System.runFinalizersOnExit?

[Peter Levart]

On 01/27/2015 10:49 AM, Aleksey Shipilev wrote:
> On 27.01.2015 07:37, Mandy Chung wrote:
>> System.runFinalizationOnExit has been deprecated since 1998 (JDK 1.2)
>> and this method is inherently unsafe.  I am thinking to propose this method
>> in JDK 9 to throw UnsupportedOperationException.
>>
>> I believe it's rare for existing applications using
>> System.runFinalizationOnExit.
>> My analysis on Maven Central ~315K artifacts that show about ~15 unique
>> artifacts calling System.runFinalizationOnExit while they all come from
>> only 5 classes.
> I think while the use case for runFinalizationOnExit(true) is weird to
> begin with, there seems to be a valid reason to enforce the finalizers
> to run at the end, e.g. to properly free the *critical* underlying
> resources. At this point rFOE(true) trick is, while unsafe, still
> operational, right? If we are to remove rFOE(true) escape hatch, what do
> we propose users to do?
>
> Thanks,
> -Aleksey.
>
I think that finalizers as designed can not be used to properly shutdown 
the program running in a VM as a whole, since they are inherently 
limited to private iter-independent resources like primitive system 
resources (file handles, memory handles, etc...). And those don't need 
explicit "proper" shutdown as OS usually takes care of them when the 
process ends. Admittedly this does not happen if VM is used embedded in 
a process that does not end when the VM exits.

A poor-man's escape hatch is a shutdown hook that calls 
System.runFinalization(). Which might interfere with other shutdown 
hooks that run concurrently (runFinalizersOnExit runs finalizers after 
all shutdown hooks are finished).

To support orderly shutdown of a program running in a VM, other non-JDK 
solutions are available (app containers like Spring, etc...).

Regards, Peter