Re: Reference counting and idempotent finalize

[Natasha Kerensikova <lithiumcat@gmail.com>]

On 2013-09-11, Dmitry A. Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:
> You could make an alternative version for debug scenario which keeps track
> of all changes of the reference count dumping them on errors. GNAT stack
> trace is handy for that. Do not trust reference counting, it is an endless
> source of many hideous errors even if the implementation of is correct.

Would you please elaborate on why reference counting shouldn't be
trusted? What dangers am I brazingly exposing myself to?

> Tracing for the latest exception when in Finalize (GNAT functionality) is
> extremely helpful as well, because upon error propagation you get a
> snowball of cascading exceptions hiding the original problem. Always kill
> any exceptions in Finalize and do an emergency tracing in the handler.
>
> Yet another version is likely needed for tasking, that is when the
> reference objects are used concurrently, so that the reference count is
> updated concurrently. You will need a protected object to handle increments
> and decrements and careful design preventing concurrent increments when the
> count reached 0.

All these refinements are way beyond the scope a basic roll-my-own
implementation. If I needed such complexity I wouldn't have tried to
implement it without having thoroughly checked that there is no suitable
implementation already available.

I have roughly the same heuristic for concurrent stuff and for proper
fault recovery as I have for cryptography: never try to code it at home
unless it really does not exist elsewhere yet.