status of gcj's boehm collector?

Fri Dec 7 01:46:00 GMT 2001

 > > We depend on system.gc closing unused file descriptors. I suspect
 > > we'd run out of those long before running out of memory in some
 > > applications.
 > > 
Boehm, Hans writes:
 > Interesting. Unfortunately, I think the standard Java interface isn't quite
 > sufficient to do that right. I think the logic to do this properly is:
 > 
 > if (I'm out of file descriptors and need one, but not before) {
 > for (;;) {
 > 	System.gc();
 > 	System.runFinalization();
 > 	if (the preceding call ran no finalizers || file descriptor is
 > available) break;
 > }
 > } 
 > 
 > The loop is needed because running finalizers may result in
 > dropping more objects. If finalization dependencies are correctly
 > enforced (in Java the client code needs to do that), that's even
 > reasonably likely. I think this mean you really need
 > runFinalization to return an indication of whether or not it did
 > anything so that you can avoid a potentially infinite loop here.
What I'm wondering is whether this is a real or a theoretical
requirement for gcj. So, for our current implementation, is there any
chance that calling System.gc() might not call finalizers for files
that are garmabge before returing? 
Andrew.