Re: Emacs and/or Lisp on Lego Mindstorms?

[tomas]

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On Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 05:39:11PM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> >       * Support for stopping motors when the
> >         object is garbage collected
> 
> FWIW, this would be a typical example of ill-advised use of finalizers,
> in my book.

:-)

Ah, old war stories come to mind. Like that old "enterprise" class
application in Java which relied on database connections being
closed whenever its parent object got garbage collected.

The app tended to work (for some value of "work") until management
decided to buy more RAM for the machine. Lots of more RAM. The app
started crashing (about once a day), and since "booting" the whole
thing took around half an hour, users were... hmmm.

Lots of cheerful debugging ensued. The result: since now the machine
had much more RAM, it didn't run into memory pressure that quickly,
meaning it hadn't to garbage collect as often, meaning it could
leave more stale DB connections lingering around meaning... the
application ran into the maximum licensed DB connections (did I
mention it was an Oracle DB, where you pay for everything)?

So yes, Stefan's short phrase above is worth careful consideration :)

Cheers
- -- t
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