[Gambas-user] Class behavior: _free method

[Benoit Minisini]

Le 15/12/2022 à 18:08, T Lee Davidson a écrit :
> On 12/15/22 10:51, CD wrote:
>> Hello
>>
>> I join a test project that gives me 3 problems
>>
>> 1°) the class name during the instantiation is forced with a capital 
>> letter:
>> clsTestClass becomes ClsTestClass.
> 
> It doesn't behave that way here. I can choose "clsTestClass" from the 
> auto-completion dropdown which also shows the public symbols of the class.
> 
>>
>> 2°) As I must share the same instance between several procedures, I 
>> declare it
>> without instantiating it in the declarations.
>> But when I instantiated it in one of the procedures, Gambas does not 
>> offer me
>> the public members of the class.
> 
> The program behaves as expected here even using the uppercase class 
> name, "ClsTestClass". When having difficulties such as this, it might 
> help to "Compile all" to make the IDE aware of new classes and/or class 
> properties and methods.

Mmm... I'm not sure this is not a bug introduced recently. I will check

> 
>>
>> 3°) The class contains a Timer, and when I free the instance, I 
>> thought I could
>> free the Timer. It does not work!
>> First I have to free the Timer from outside the class, so that I can 
>> free the
>> instance afterwards...
> 
> There was a discussion of this some time ago. I think it was in regards 
> to me trying unsuccessfully to close open sockets in the _free method. 
> The issue, IIRC, was caused by the sequence of events that happen when a 
> resource is freed, and, yes, it is to be expected. Unfortunately, I 
> don't recall exactly how Benoît explained it. I'll have to see if I can 
> find that discussion in the mailing list archive.
> 

It's more simple than that: As soon an object A that raises events is 
created inside another object B, the object A internally references the 
object B as its "event observer". So B cannot be freed before the object 
A is freed.

Specifically, to free the timer, you must stop it and release all 
references on it.

Regards,

-- 
Benoît Minisini.