• akcom (7/7) Mar 05 2006 As I currently understand it, "deleting" an object simply marks it as
• Brad Roberts (12/18) Mar 05 2006 I'm fairly sure your understanding is wrong. You don't have to explicit...

akcom <CppCoder gmail.com> writes:

As I currently understand it, "deleting" an object simply marks it as 
ready for deletion when the garbage collector makes its period sweeps. 
After skimming through the phobos std source, I saw very VERY little use 
of the delete keyword, especially in regards to classes.  My question 
is, how does the gc know when those classes are no longer being 
referenced? Also, are the explicit delete's I'm using on .dup'ed 
strings, classes, etc useless?

Brad Roberts <braddr puremagic.com> writes:

On Sun, 5 Mar 2006, akcom wrote:

 As I currently understand it, "deleting" an object simply marks it as ready
 for deletion when the garbage collector makes its period sweeps. After
 skimming through the phobos std source, I saw very VERY little use of the
 delete keyword, especially in regards to classes.  My question is, how does
 the gc know when those classes are no longer being referenced? Also, are the
 explicit delete's I'm using on .dup'ed strings, classes, etc useless?

I'm fairly sure your understanding is wrong.  You don't have to explicitly 
delete objects and they will be cleaned up at some point by the garbage 
collector (though that's not guaranteed in the face of things like the 
program exiting).  However, if you explicitly delete something, it's 
destructor is called right then and there and the memory becomes available 
for reuse immediately.

The docs on this are incomplete, imho, so I'll file a bug asking that they 
be elaborated upon:

    http://www.digitalmars.com/d/expression.html#DeleteExpression

Later,
Brad