Re: Swarms, zones, dropping, and resource management.

[Albert-Jan Brouwer]

Marus G. Daniels <address@hidden> wrote:

> AB> - Is drop being called on an object when a containing swarm or
> AB> zone is dropped?
> 
> No.

Then the commentary in the ExperSwarm.m example is somewhat misleading:

  //  We drop the modelSwarm's activity, and then drop the modelSwarm
  // itself which drops of the objects built by modelSwarm
                  ^^^^^
  [[modelSwarm getActivity] drop];
  [modelSwarm drop];

Speaking of which, is it essential to first drop the activity? The whole
activity stuff of a swarm is built within its zone and thus should get
destroyed with the swarm. Is it because the activity contains resources
that are not tracked by the zone mechanism or is it because any future
multi-threading supporting implementation of Swarm might be busy calling
methods on the swarm to be dropped while its activity exists?

In general, can it be assumed that all objects created from support classes
that are part of the Swarm system clean up any additional resources they
might have allocated when the zone that contains them is dropped?

For example, from the documentation of OutFile in the simtools library,
which says that its drop method closes the opened file and must be called
to close it, it would seem that destruction of an OutFile instance upon
freeing a zone leaves the file open (as its drop method is not called).

Regarding the zone (protocol support) of a swarm, can it already be used
during the create phase or may objects be allocated within a swarm
only after createEnd?

Best regards,

Albert-Jan

---
Albert-Jan Brouwer, department of molecular physics, Leiden University.
EMail: address@hidden or address@hidden


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