Re: Recommended way to cleanup your own gobject types in a desktop app (finalize and/or dispose)

["Ali Sabil" <ali sabil gmail com>]

Hmm,

Now that I re read what I wrote, it seems like it was misleading, I
didn't mean that the dispose should dereference other objects it holds
more than once.

Anyway, quoting the GObject tutorial :
"The dispose method is called when the object first knows it will be
destroyed. It is supposed to release any references to resources that
may need some advance warning due to reference cycles, or may be
scarce and thus contended for by other objects. The dispose method may
be called any number of times, and thus the code therein should be
safe in that case. Guarding the dispose code with a static variable is
a common practise. The object is also expected to be usable without
unrecoverable error (such as a SEGFAULT) after dispose has been run,
so some members cannot be freed or altered during the dispose process.
Recoverable errors, such as returning error codes or NULL values, are
fine.

The finalize method finishes releasing the remaining resources just
before the object itself will be freed from memory, and therefore it
will only be called once. The two step process helps reduce cycles in
reference counting schemes. "

Is this inaccurate ? Please correct me if I am wrong

--
Ali


On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Ronald S. Bultje <rsbultje gmail com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
> On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 7:00 AM, Ali Sabil <ali sabil gmail com> wrote:
> > The dispose will be called as
> > many times as necessary to remove the references to other object (and thus
> break
> > possible cycles), and when the object's ref count drop to 0, the
> > finalize is called to
> > completely free any resource held by the object.
>
> No, both are called when the ref is zero and the dispose should only
> dereference other objects it holds a reference to once.
>
> Ronald
>