The ISO review ends May 22, 2001. The standard is scheduled to be approved and published by the end of next year. Since J4 has not received any public review comments yet, J4 had time to work on technical reports for finalizers and a class library. Since the holidays were soon after the December J4 meeting, this is the first report I've given of that meeting. Major decisions from that meeting are included at the end of this report.
Referenced documents are available upon request.
It will be invokable by the system when it is determined that the object is no longer accessible and before the object is reclaimed by the garbage collector. We will not allow finalizers in factory objects. We will not have a mechanism to suspend finalizers and garbage collection. We will not prohibit side effect in finalizers, but will provide non-normative documentation of possible side effects. Unhandled fatal exceptions in a finalizer will terminate the run unit.