This may have been discussed earlier; if so, kindly point me to the previous discussions.
Lua uses garbage collection for everything. User-defined objects can use metatables to perform appropriate finalization. For example, Lua's built-in io library use the __gc field in its files' metatable to close the underlying OS file, even if the user does not call the file:close function. That works very well, except that finalization is non-deterministic, i.e., it is impossible to predict when it will happen.
Using the example of files, this may be problematic, because the file remains open unpredictably long, which may interfere with the other uses of the file. It could be said that if determinism is important, the user must ensure that file:close is called. Unfortunately, taking into account that there can be some very complicated logic between io.open and file:close, which may also raise Lua errors, this could lead to extremely unwieldy code.
This problem is not specific to Lua and probably exists in every GC-collected environment, so there are some established ways of dealing with it. In C#, for example, this is done via the keyword 'using', which establishes a scope, upon exiting which (including exiting via an exception), the object is finalized. Example from
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/yh598w02.aspx
using (Font font1 = new Font("Arial", 10.0f))
{
byte charset = font1.GdiCharSet;
}
Syntactically, this could be transferred to Lua using a new keyword, such as block, instead of local, to define a local variable that must be finalized when exiting the block (including error exits). The finalization will use the __gc methamethod, if present, and subsequent garbage collection proceeds in the usual manner. For example:
block file = io.open('file')
The use of a new keyword seems necessary so that the user could control whether this block-scope finalization is to happen, because it will be unsuitable when the object is supposed to outlive its block. This could probably be also controlled by some clever metatable manipulation; but that will make it an 'advanced' feature, limiting its adoption.
Comments?
Cheers,
V.
