withFile defeats dead handle closure

[Sven Panne]

Am Mi., 30. Dez. 2020 um 22:47 Uhr schrieb Viktor Dukhovni <
ietf-dane at dukhovni.org>:

> [...]  It would amount to relying on GC to close the handle perhaps a bit
> earlier, and my take is that any such reliance is a bug.[...]


+1

As a general rule of thumb: Automatic memory management is good for, well,
memory management, but nothing else. Quite the opposite: Most of the time
it's horrible for other tasks. There are tons of points in the design space
of automatic memory management with vastly different trade-offs regarding
throughput, latency, concurrency etc., so tying other "heavy" resources
like file descriptors to automatic memory management is a very, very bad
idea. People had cunning ideas about how to (ab-)use finalizers etc. for
decades, but basically all of them turned out to be bad. Hans-J. Boehm has
written extensively about this, and his papers are still worth reading
today.
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