Proposal: Automatic Resource Management (original) (raw)

Joshua Bloch jjb at google.com
Sat Feb 28 12:33:03 PST 2009

Neal,

On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 11:27 AM, Neal Gafter <neal at gafter.com> wrote:

On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 11:08 AM, Joshua Bloch <jjb at google.com> wrote: >> Particularly concerning to me is >> the fact that this translation would sometimes silently swallow >> exceptions indicating serious program failures > > Unless I am missing something, the construct only "silently swallows" > exceptions when they are intentionally suppressed in favor of prior > exceptions, which typically indicate more serious problems.

The language construct as you specified it has no way to determine which exception is more serious. For example, a VM failure, such as an out-of-memory condition on the close(), is more serious than a closed connection on a particular write.

Please take a closer look at the desugaring! Like all VM failures, OutOfMemoryError is not a subtype of Exception, so it will never be suppressed by the automatic resource management statement. This is by design. While the specified suppression behavior may not be perfect, it does a far better job than most programmers do when left to cope with the situation themselves.

         Josh

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