Finaliser and Destructor in C++/CLR and their equivalents in C#

In C# we all know the standard way of finalising an object that potentially contains both managed and unmanaged resources is like

 1 class SomeDisposableEntity : IDisposable
 2 {
 3     #region Constructors
 4 
 5     ~SomeDisposableEntity()    // finalizer
 6     {
 7         Dispose(false);    // invoked from finalizer
 8     }
 9     
10     #endregion
11     
12     #region IDisposable members
13    
14     public void Dispose()
15     {
16         Dispose(true);    // invoked from disposing method
17         GC.SuppressFinalize(this);
18     }
19    
20     #endregion
21     
22     #region Methods
23    
24     protected virtual void Dispose(bool disposing)
25     {
26         if (disposing)
27         {
28             // free managed resources if any (use flags to prevent duplicated deallocation)
29             // ...
30         }
31         // free native resources if any (use flags to prevent duplicated deallocation)
32         // ...
33     }
34    
35     #endregion
36     
37     #endregion
38 }

The equivalent C++/CLR looks a bit complicated to C++ programmers, as it introduced the finaliser language feature in addition to the traditional destructor. However to make it simple, we just remember that its finaliser is equivalent to finaliser in C# (with different denotations) and thereby invoked by the garbage collector and C++'s destructor is kind of similar to C#'s Dispose() method responsibility-wise. Therefore note that destructor is normally called before finaliser is called and it's mentioned on MSDN that finalisation of the object is suppressed once the destructor is called, and a typical pattern of writing finalisation code in C++/CLR would be

 1 class SomeDisposableEntity
 2 {
 3     !SomeDisposableEntity()       // finaliser
 4     {
 5         // clean up unmanaged resources if any; make sure not to free twice
 6         // hence it's similar to C#'s Dispose(false) call
 7         // ...
 8     }
 9     
10     ~SomeDisposableEntity()       // destructor
11     {
12         // clean up managed resources if any; use flags to avoid freeing twice 
13         // hence together with the finaliser call below it's similar to C#'s Dispose(true) call
14         // ...
15         !SomeDisposableEntity();  // destructor always invokes finaliser to clean up unmanaged resources
16     }
17 };

References

[1] Destructors and Finalizers in Visual C++, MSDN, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms177197(v=vs.80).aspx

[2] Implement IDisposable Correctly, MSDN, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms244737(v=vs.80).aspx

posted @ 2013-06-07 08:01  quanben  阅读(326)  评论(0编辑  收藏  举报