Disposing underlying object from finalizer in an immutable object
- by Juan Luis Soldi
I'm trying to wrap around Awesomium and make it look to the rest of my code as close as possible to NET's WebBrowser since this is for an existing application that already uses the WebBrowser.
In this library, there is a class called JSObject which represents a javascript object. You can get one of this, for instance, by calling the ExecuteJavascriptWithResult method of the WebView class. If you'd call it like myWebView.ExecuteJavascriptWithResult("document", string.Empty).ToObject(), then you'd get a JSObject that represents the document.
I'm writing an immutable class (it's only field is a readonly JSObject object) called JSObjectWrap that wraps around JSObject which I want to use as base class for other classes that would emulate .NET classes such as HtmlElement and HtmlDocument. Now, these classes don't implement Dispose, but JSObject does. What I first thought was to call the underlying JSObject's Dispose method in my JSObjectWrap's finalizer (instead of having JSObjectWrap implement Dispose) so that the rest of my code can stay the way it is (instead of having to add using's everywhere and make sure every JSObjectWrap is being properly disposed).
But I just realized if more than two JSObjectWrap's have the same underlying JSObject and one of them gets finalized this will mess up the other JSObjectWrap. So now I'm thinking maybe I should keep a static Dictionary of JSObjects and keep count of how many of each of them are being referenced by a JSObjectWrap but this sounds messy and I think could cause major performance issues.
Since this sounds to me like a common pattern I wonder if anyone else has a better idea.
