[fpc-devel] Defer keyword

Marco van de Voort fpc at pascalprogramming.org
Thu May 6 18:44:50 CEST 2021


Op 2021-05-06 om 17:38 schreef Ryan Joseph via fpc-devel:
> Something which annoys me about Pascal is cleanup in which a function exits in multiple places but there is no formal way to free memory which may be used in the current scope. I say ultimately Pascal needs some opt-in automatic reference counting for TObject but the "defer" keyword would be helpful alternative to what we have now, which is nothing.
>
> The concept is very easy to understand and should be easy to implement by simply making a "defer" statement node which is added to a list and then called during function finalization like the other ref counted objects (dynamic array, interfaces etc....).

But those types have refcounting built-in and always active. Things like 
defer don't, which makes that all objects gets refcounting overhead in 
case somebody needs it for "defer".

Contrary to Pascal both the language you reference have garbage 
collectors, so their objects are already managed anyway,





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