Proposal: Automatic Resource Management

[Neal Gafter]

I guess I assumed you were aware why people complain about
Closeable.close() throwing IOException.  Josh alluded to this when he
said that Disposable won't be terribly useful as a parameter type.
When you pass it somewhere, the receiver must assume that the close()
method throws any Exception, and that forces the receiver to write
code to handle the whole Exception hierarchy.  I think it's likely
that programmers would want to pass a Disposable around so that the
receiver can put a region of code under control of the resource (i.e.
dispose it when the receiver arrives at some particular point of
completion).  I'm afraid this would just be trading one set of pain
points for another.

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 6:26 PM, Reinier Zwitserloot
<reinier at zwitserloot.com> wrote:
> The new Disposable idea makes this proposal much cleaner, Josh. I like
> it.
>
> Neal, could you perhaps elaborate on the pain that Disposable is going
> to cause? Insinuating that proposals are Bad Ideas without any
> specifics whatsoever seems better suited to some sort of voting cycle.
> On this mailing list it seems counter-productive to say the least.
>
>  --Reinier Zwitserloot
>
>
>
> On Mar 4, 2009, at 03:08, Neal Gafter wrote:
>
>> Given all the gnashing of teeth over the fact that Closeable's close
>> method throws IOException, I can only imagine the pain that
>> Disposable.close() throwing Exception will cause.
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 5:47 PM, Joshua Bloch <jjb at google.com> wrote:
>>> I have modified the proposal in light of Mark's example.  The only
>>> change is
>>> that the Disposable interface is no longer parameterized.  This
>>> eliminates
>>> the incompatibility noted by Neal; so far as I know, the revised
>>> proposal
>>> introduces no incompatibilities. It can be found here:
>>> http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddv8ts74_0vnstdfdh .
>>>     Happy reading,
>>>
>>>     Josh
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
>