Although the question was asking about the Object.finalize method, the subject really is about the finalization mechanism as a whole. This mechanism includes not only the surface API Object.finalize, but it also includes specifications of the programming language about the life cycle of objects, and practical impact on garbage collector implementations in JVMs. Much has … Read more
finalize and other approaches that use GC knowledge of objects lifetime have a couple of nuances: visibility: do you guarantee that all the writes methods of object o made are visible to the finalizer (i.e., there is a happens-before relationship between the last action on object o and the code performing finalization)? reachability: how do … Read more
There are different valid uses for IDisposable. A simple example is holding an open file, which you need to be closed at certain moment, as soon as you don’t need it any more. Of course, you could provide a method Close, but having it in Dispose and using pattern like using (var f = new … Read more