Posted by Udo Schneider on Aug 02, 2014; 11:16am
URL: https://forum.world.st/Finalization-question-tp4771533.html

All,

I just stumbled over something which thought was pretty easy - turned
out it isn't as easy as I thought or I'm simply _______ (fill in
expression of choice like "too dumb", "blind", etc.)

I have an object which starts a background process to do it's job. This
object holds a reference to the running proccess in an instance variable.

My goal is to #terminate that proccess once the object isn't needed
anymore (before GC).

Using WeakRegistry for the object itself doesn't work. E.g.

MyObject>>#initialize
        super initialize.
        WeakRegistry default register: self.
        myProcess := self startProcess.

MyObject>>#finalize
        myProcess terminate. "Doesn't work. myProcess is already nil"

I think this is due to all the ivars of the object already being nil
when #finalize is begin called. As far as I read the code this is due to
Object>>#executor returning a shallow copy of the object and thus being
by intention ...

So how to proceed? Did I miss something obvious? Is overwriting
#executor the way to go (in terms of "does it work" and "doesn't it
break something")?

Best Regards,

Udo