How to deterministically release TF objects
Opened this issue · 1 comments
Description
When updating to the latest TF.NET I noticed that Dispose methods were removed from types.
This seems to be done in e5dfe90#diff-fa5a105168638b6355c038d3eb3749d77f6e7c38c91bf7ec623b26cac68a8d1e
While using SafeHandles is good, that doesn't eliminate the need for Dispose. Objects which contain other objects with a Dispose method, should themselves expose a Dispose method, even if they don't have native resources to dispose. This helps callers get a deterministic Dispose rather than waiting for GC / Finalizers to run.
See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/design-guidelines/dispose-pattern
✓ DO implement the Basic Dispose Pattern on types containing instances of disposable types. See the Basic Dispose Pattern section for details on the basic pattern.
If a type is responsible for the lifetime of other disposable objects, developers need a way to dispose of them, too. Using the container’s Dispose method is a convenient way to make this possible.
The removal of Dispose methods was also a binary breaking change. I was able to workaround that by casting these objects to their SafeHandle types then calling Dispose on those, but I wanted to pose the above question as a better reason to preserve the existing behavior -- since presumably TF.NET doesn't have a binary compatibility promise.