Re: IO not closed by GC

Ruby
1

Even GC.start does not guarantee that the garbage collection will be
actually started, it is just a hint after all. And I am not sure that
even when an IO object is being garbage collected, there will be an
implicit call to close(). I personally would not expect it as no
finalizers are installed by default.

So the programmer must take care to write the correct code, short or
long ;-).

Even if GC.start helped in your case, the overall code would be longer
(because of calls to GC.start) and work much worse (as GC does a lot
that you may not need for the moment) than what I have suggested. And
using blocks with popen is GUARANTEED to close descriptors properly. See
my point?

By the way, you are welcome.

Gennady.

2

I have a question abt this GC stuff, tangential to the challenge
itself, so million pardons, but I see this in many languages – it’s
always a suggestion rather than a requirement. Is this just to trip up
incautious programmers with shallow understanding? Or is it a hook for
special cases when you want to override that stuff w/custom memory
mgmt? What’s the benefit? I’ve seen so much use of this type of
command in bad Java and virtually never seen ppl using it anywhere
else. I guess I sound kind of aggressive or critical but it’s a common
decision among language designers so there must be some reason for it.
(Also apologies for the brevity, I’m on my mobile.)

Giles