Automatic Resource Management and Simple Resource Clean-up (original) (raw)

Thorsten van Ellen thorsten at vanellen.de
Tue Mar 3 13🔞54 PST 2009

Josh, Neal and Roger!

I have had this idea also for a long time. I think it is in a "tradition" of java of suppressing typical programming errors. A good example for the tradition is automatic memory management and garbage collection that is a very complex mechanism to avoid one very typical programming error.

Management of resources other than memory usually is really as buggy as memory management. My observation is that resource management is one of the most frequent bug pattern I know of. Look at any project: you hardly find correct optimal implemented examples and you nearly always find bugs in every non trivial project. Analysing/finding the bug often is very difficult like finding memory management bugs.

It seems to me, the feature benefit is worth some more effort. The effort of thinking a bit more about it might be not too much, especially if your heading toward a "minimal" solution like "simple clean up", but I don't know what is "affordable" in jdk7-schedule.

Just to put in some additional/new ideas and to "make the cake bigger" before it is reduced to the optimal solution ("brain-storming", sometimes thinkind around a corner helps):

Both proposed solutions might have problems with resource management, that is distributed/shared/spread between two or more separated methods. Such problems might be solved with a kind of GOF-"pattern", interfaces and a tiny "resource management library".

And there exist even more complicated resource management problems like ACID database transactions that do not only have one "close"-operation but two (commit and rollback) and a more complex decision process between those.

But regarding these additional ideas may also be counterproductive for a tiny language modification that solves 98 % of the typical bugs and therefore may also be ignored!

Best regards

Thorsten van Ellen

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