Ephemerons: a new finalization mechanism

ABSTRACT

Finalization occurs when a garbage collector informs an application that an object is "almost collectable." It is used to help an application maintain its invariants. To make finalization more useful, this paper defines "almost collectable" in terms of a new class of objects, called ephemerons. Ephemerons are similar to weak pairs, but an object in an ephemeron's key field may be classed as "almost collectable" even if it is reachable from the epehemeron's value fields.

References

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Index Terms

• Software and its engineering

  • Software notations and tools

    • General programming languages

      • Language types

  • Software organization and properties

    • Contextual software domains

      • Operating systems

        • Memory management

          • Allocation / deallocation strategies