Question

I got this idea while thinking of ways to recycling objects. I am doing this as an experiment to see how memory pooling works and I realize that in 99% of scenario this is very unnecessary .

However, I have a question. Is there a way to force the GC to keep the object? In other words, can I tell the GC not to destroy an object and say instead have new reference created in a list that holds available to use objects? The issue, though I have not tested this, is that if I add something like this to a list:

~myObject()
{
     ((List<myObject>)HttpContext.Current.Items[typeof(T).ToString()]).add(this);//Lets assume this is ASP
}

it will add a pointer to this object into the list, but if the object is destroyed I will get a null pointer exception because the object is no longer there. However, maybe I could tell the GC not to collect this item and thus keeping the object?

I know this is the type of stuff that most programmers would go “why the hell would you do this?”. But on the other hand programming is about trying new and learning new things. Any suggestions, thoughts, implementatons? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Yes, this is legitimate. It is called ‘resurrection’. When you assign the this reference to somewhere that is ‘live’, then the object is no longer considered garbage.

You will also need to reregister for finalization using GC.ReRegisterForFinalize(this), or the next time the object becomes garbage, it will not be finalized (the destructor will not be called).

You can read more about object resurrection in this MSDN Magazine article.