Finalization

Use

Finalization is mostly used for cleanup, to release memory or other resources: to deallocate memory allocated via manual memory management; to clear references if reference counting is used (decrement reference counts); to release resources, particularly in the resource acquisition is initialization (RAII) idiom; or to unregister an object. The amount of finalization varies significantly between languages, from extensive finalization in C++, which has manual memory management, reference counting, and deterministic object lifetimes; to often no finalization in Java, which has non-deterministic object lifetimes and is often implemented with a tracing garbage collector. It is also possible for there to be little or no explicit (user-specified) finalization, but significant implicit finalization, performed by the compiler, interpreter, or runtime; this is common in case of automatic reference counting, as in the CPython reference implementation of Python, or in Automatic Reference Counting in Apple's implementation of Objective-C, which both automatically break references during finalization. A finalizer can include arbitrary code; a particularly complex use is to automatically return the object to an object pool.