Re: Finalization of static package variables

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On May 9, 1:20 am, Stephen Leake <stephen_le...@stephe-leake.org>
wrote:
> Manuel Collado <m.coll...@lml.ls.fi.upm.es> writes:
> > Variables declared in the global scope of a package body seem not to
> > be finalized automatically at the end of the whole program (using GNAT
> > 3.15p on WindowsXP).
>
> Is there some reason you are not using a more current version of GNAT?
>
> > If some of these variables contain certain GUI stuff, the program
> > remains as a zombie process after the main procedure termination.
>
> Technically, that cannot be true; the "main procedure" is the
> "environment task", and it does not "terminate" (in the Ada definition
> of that word) until all of the tasks it has spawned have "terminated".
>
> I think that what you are saying is that there are some tasks that
> have not terminated when the main procedure is ready to terminate, and
> that in fact those tasks never terminate.

Except that Manuel never said he was using tasks.  I'm envisioning
that he probably has a controlled object whose initialization causes
some Windows process to be spawned (either directly or via some
function in some other GUI library), and finalization causes the
process to be terminated.


> If the type of the variable is derived from
> Ada.Finalization.Controlled or Limited_Controlled, it will be
> finalized when it goes out of scope. Otherwise, it won't be.
>
> However, a static package variable never goes out of scope, so that is
> no help.

No, I believe that all objects, including static package variables
*and* including allocated objects that have not yet been deallocated,
are supposed to be finalized when the environment task completes.
10.2(25), 7.6.1(10).

                                 -- Adam