This is part 1/5 of my Deterministic Finalization and IDisposable post series.
This topic has been covered many times by many others (such as here and here), so if you are familiar with C#’s using statement and IDisposable interface, feel free to skip this post. I’m writing this introduction to provide the necessary background information to set up a series of subsequent posts.
Garbage collection, found in languages such as C# and Java (among many others), is a very useful feature: it largely alleviates the need for a programmer to manually handle resource management. The most commonly cited benefit is that garbage collection eliminates the need for the programmer to explicitly call heap memory management functions such as malloc and free; instead, the garbage collector automatically keeps track of whether objects are still in use and frees them when they are no longer needed.1 However, in addition to handling memory management, garbage collection may also release other scarce resources upon cleanup, such as file locks or network connections.