RFR 9: 8165641 : Deprecate Object.finalize

[Andrew Haley]

On 14/03/17 14:01, Timo Kinnunen wrote:

> File handles aren’t that scarce of a resource, really, at least on
> Windows.

I've seen processes running out of file handles.  It is possible to
change the per-process limit.  And, of course, there is a lot of
hidden context in the kernel and device drivers.

> On Windows threads are a lot scarcer resource than file handles, and
> I don’t recall anyone suggesting Java’s GC wasn’t suitable for
> managing that limited but crucially important resource.

Java's GC isn't used for managing threads.

> The question should then be, what makes threads so much easier to
> manage than file handles and how can we make file handles be more
> like threads?

They're not.

> Food for thought: threads need a big stack which means a lot of
> memory, but a file handle might be just 8 bytes which is hard to
> keep track of. So, change the storage of file handles to use slot-0
> of new long[65536];

I did try that, and it does work, but it's an ugly waste of memory.

Andrew.