Patterns and best practices

While dealing with managed runtime and garbage collection, there are certain patterns and anti-patterns developers must be careful with. If not handled properly, both managed and native objects can produce noncollectable traces, which in turn can cause memory leaks and unnecessary resource consumption.

Disposable objects

The resources managed by the garbage collector are generally limited to memory allocations. Other resources like network sockets, database handles, UI elements, and file/device descriptors need to have additional definitions or mechanisms.

In managed runtime, these object resources can be cleaned up in two different ways. The first, less efficient, unpredictable way is to implement a destructor/finalizer. With a finalizer implementation, once the garbage collector decides the object is no longer strongly reachable, the resources such as network sockets can be disposed. However, finalizable objects have to wait for the following GC cycle to be cleaned...