withFile defeats dead handle closure

[David Feuer]

Finalizers aren't free, but every handle already has a finalizer, so that's
not an extra cost.

On Wed, Dec 30, 2020, 2:50 PM Oleg Grenrus <oleg.grenrus at iki.fi> wrote:

> I would be afraid of making this change. File descriptors are a scarce
> resource, and relying on non-deterministic GC behavior to free them is
> big -1.
>
> Also finalizers are not free in current GC. (Though, you probably cannot
> won't that many open files that it would matter).
>
> - Oleg
>
> On 30.12.2020 21.23, David Feuer wrote:
> > withFile keeps the handle it creates alive until the user action
> > completes. If we want to avoid this, we can. All that's required is to
> > capture the weak reference that holds the handle's finalizer. Then
> > instead of closing the handle in the end (or on exception) using
> > hClose, withFile can run the handle's finalizer. Should we do this? Or
> > does it run too much against the idea that handles should be managed
> > as explicitly as possible?
> >
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