Time to retire System.runFinalizersOnExit?

[Stuart Marks]

On 1/28/15 7:07 AM, Alan Bateman wrote:
> On 27/01/2015 04:37, 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.
>>
>> Any thought/feedback?
> It's broken in other ways beyond what is in the @deprecated note so I don't
> think it's much of a loss to finally disable it. I don't know if you have come
> up with candidate wording to replace the existing wording but having it
> reference the shutdown hooks and the ref API might be useful.

As I understand it, it's not System.runFinalizationOnExit() *itself* that's 
unsafe, it's the act of running finalizers on still-reachable objects at exit 
time that's unsafe.

A potential alternative would thus be to change the method call to be a no-op, 
and just disable the running of finalizers at exit time. This would let us 
remove the unsafe behavior, and it avoids forcing people to recompile code that 
calls rFOE.

Clearly, this would be a silent change in behavior, which is usually something 
we want to avoid. But the calling code can't tell the difference anyway. This is 
to be traded off against potential forced recompiles, which don't add much value 
beyond notification, but which may be inconvenient or even impractical in some 
cases. I'm not sure of the right tradeoff here.

s'marks