Path: utzoo!attcan!telly!nebulus!contact!ben
From: ben@contact.uucp (Ben Eng)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: resource tracking
Summary: automatic resource reclamation
Keywords: from Order comes CAOS
Message-ID: <1990Feb4.213328.5099@contact.uucp>
Date: 4 Feb 90 21:33:28 GMT
References: <355.25C92297@weyr.FIDONET.ORG>
Reply-To: ben@contact.UUCP (Ben Eng)
Distribution: na
Organization: Jet Penguin Lavatories
Lines: 36

In article <355.25C92297@weyr.FIDONET.ORG> Jeff.Petkau@weyr.FIDONET.ORG (Jeff Petkau) writes:
>or use intuition's Remember lists (automatically, that is.)  For most
>other things (screens, windows, filehandles, locks, libraries,
>fonts...) keep a list of something like
> 
> struct FunkyRemember {
>    void (*CloseFunc)(); /* the function to close this object */
>         long Arg;                               /* the argument to pass closefunc */
>         struct FunkyRemember *Next;
> };
> 
>Now, say you call OpenScreen().  OpenScreen will create a new
>FunkyRemember with CloseFunc=CloseScreen, Arg=the screen pointer and
>link it into the list kept in your task structure.

It is not quite as trivial as it sounds.  Some resources such as
Windows are dependent upon other resources (ie. a Screen) being
already allocated.  If you don't deallocate the resources in the
correct order, things will blow up miserably.

Many Intuition type resources will require special coding to handle
this anyway.

General-purpose resource tracking is great if you want to be able to
kill a program, or if your program only deallocates its resources when
it exits.  Half the time, a programmer will probably find himself
dynamically allocating a resource and returning it to the system as
soon as the program is finished with it.  The latter case would
require the extra code anyway.

Ben
-- 
Ben Eng                  | ben@contact.uucp  _or_  ben@ziebmef.mef.org
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