The following question was raised during my development of an asynchronous library https://github.com/lokedhs/cl-rabbit-async I'm currently building for RabbitMQ.
In summary, the library allows you to create an object of type ASYNCH-CONNECTION, from which instances of ASYNC-CHANNEL can be retrieved. A connection holds a reference to all channels that it uses, and each channel holds a reference to its connection. The connection object has a pointer to a native CFFI object that for the underlying connection (my library is built on the RabbitMQ C API).
My question is: Should I use trivial-garbage to create a GC hook for the connection object so that if the user of the library forgets to close the connection, it will get closed eventually once it's GC'ed?
I can see arguments for both behaviours:
- It's a bad idea, since losing the reference to the connection object means that the program is broken, and silently cleaning up the underlying connection might hide the fact there is a bug (if the GC doesn't run often enough I might have hundreds or even thousands of lingering connections) - On the other hand, it might be a good idea since Lisp developers often use the REPL to experiment, so it's easy to accidentally lose a reference to an object during testing. Thus, using the GC hook will improve the stability of one's development environment.
To me, there is no strictly correct answer to the question, which is why I'm asking for suggestions from you guys.
Regards, Elias (loke on #lisp)