F# has Handy GC

As mentioned previously I was recently learning about F#, a neat mostly functional language for the .NET vm.

One of the things I was really impressed with was that it allows the user to take advantage of timely destructors. I was under the impression that except for reference counted GC (perl, cpython, and I think C++) timely destructors were impossible and that the user is instead required to close their filehandles, database handles, or whatever other cleanup they need to do, within a finally block.

When reading the Book of F# I realized that C# and other .NET langauges can probably do this as well, since the IDisposable interface is how it’s referenced.

Unlike perl, for example, where a destructor, when defined, is always called when the object goes out of scope, in F# it’s up to the user to decide that it’s important to call it immediately. So for example, the user might know that it’s ok if a file is closed later than the block ending because it’s some kind of one off logging, but a database handle must be closed immediately for a transaction to complete or something.

🔗 `use`

F# gives the user two ways to do this. The first is with the use keyword, or binding type.

type DisposableHuman (name : string) =
  do printfn "Creating person: %s" name
  member x.Name = name
  interface System.IDisposable with
    member x.Dispose() =
      printfn "disposing: %s" name

let testDisposable() =
  use root = new DisposableHuman("outer")
  for i in [1..2] do
    use nested = new DisposableHuman(sprintf "inner %i" i)
    printfn "completing iteration %i" i
  printfn "leaving function"

testDisposable ()

The output is:

creating: outer
creating: inner 1
completing iteration 1
disposing: inner 1
creating: inner 2
completing iteration 2
disposing: inner 2
leaving function
disposing: outer

So check this out, if the user does not use use and instead opts to use let, the more typical binding, the destructors never get called:

type DisposableHuman (name : string) =
  do printfn "Creating person: %s" name
  member x.Name = name
  interface System.IDisposable with
    member x.Dispose() =
      printfn "disposing: %s" name

let testDisposable() =
  let root = new DisposableHuman("outer")
  for i in [1..2] do
    let nested = new DisposableHuman(sprintf "inner %i" i)
    printfn "completing iteration %i" i
  printfn "leaving function"

testDisposable ()

and that output is:

creating: outer
creating: inner 1
completing iteration 1
creating: inner 2
completing iteration 2
leaving function

Of course in that case the user is at fault for not calling dispose by hand, like this:

type DisposableHuman (name : string) =
  do printfn "Creating person: %s" name
  member x.Name = name
  member x.Teardown() =
    printfn "disposing: %s" name
  interface System.IDisposable with
    member x.Dispose() = x.Teardown ()

let testDisposable() =
  let root = new DisposableHuman("outer")
  for i in [1..2] do
    let nested = new DisposableHuman(sprintf "inner %i" i)
    printfn "completing iteration %i" i
    nested.Teardown ()
  printfn "leaving function"
  root.Teardown ()

testDisposable ()

And then the output we get is what we saw the first time:

creating: outer
creating: inner 1
completing iteration 1
disposing: inner 1
creating: inner 2
completing iteration 2
disposing: inner 2
disposing: outer
leaving function

🔗 `using`

Alternately, if the user has a more decomposed task, they can use the using binding, which as far as I can tell uses function scoping instead of block scoping.

type DisposableHuman (name : string) =
  do printfn "Creating person: %s" name
  member x.Name = name
  interface System.IDisposable with
    member x.Dispose() =
      printfn "disposing: %s" name

let testDisposable() =
  use root = new DisposableHuman("outer")
  for i in [1..2] do
    let name = using (new DisposableHuman(sprintf "inner %i" i)) (fun disp -> disp.Name)
    printfn "got name %s" name
  printfn "leaving function"

testDisposable ()

And then, the output:

Creating person: outer
Creating person: inner 1
disposing: inner 1
got name inner 1
Creating person: inner 2
disposing: inner 2
got name inner 2
leaving function
disposing: outer

I’m not completely sure about the difference here, but I believe the real difference is that using is functional while use is not really.

I’m actually pretty interested in this. I’ve felt for a long time that timely destructions (aka RAII) is important and weirdly missing in some newer languages. This is pretty encouraging that it’s not as rare as I thought. On the other hand much more of the onus is put on the user, which is unfortunate, but a compromise I think is probably worth making.

Posted Thu, Mar 20, 2014

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F# has Handy GC

🔗 use

🔗 using

🔗 `use`

🔗 `using`