Proposal for finalizer optimization.

[Tony Printezis]

Ramon,

You really can't just call the finalizer from the GC. Usually, the GC 
works when the application threads are stopped (i.e., during a 
"stop-the-world" pause) and no Java code is running (and the finalizer 
is Java code). There might be some synchronization issues as well. 
Imagine that the finalizer wants to take a lock that another thread is 
holding; this would deadlock the GC, as the other thread is not running 
and is waiting for the GC to complete. Finally, finalizers are arbitrary 
Java methods that can take an arbitrarily long time to execute; if you 
run them as part of the GC, you'll introduce a lot of unpredictability 
on duration of the GC. Another bummer is that most finalizers call a 
native method to do some native resource reclamation. As a result, you 
can't do some static analysis over them (i.e., you'd have to analyze 
machine code, not Java bytecodes).

Tony

Ramón García wrote:
> Yes, the idea is to run object.finalize() exactly before reclaiming
> object's memory.
>
> Ramon
>