Garbage collection

In Liberty Eiffel, when using the SmartEiffel garbage collector, a last collection is performed just before exit.

The standard Liberty Eiffel library uses the "dispose" method of disposable objects for contract checking; in particular, to check that resources that should be closed are closed.

Looks good? Yeah.

Except.

Now with mocks, contracts have to be checked too. But the latest garbage collection happens out of any scenario. It happens, well… Later; when the program is about to exit, when the test program has checked that every method that should have been called was indeed called, and so on. The test is over, we may safely exit.

And then, comes the GC, that calls dispose, that checks contracts, that calls… mocked methods! Weren't we finished?

As you can imagine, that does not end well. When not guided by a scenario, mocks don't know how to properly answer to a query.

Only one solution then: when using mock objects, that last GC should not happen, and that is that. After all, the SmartEiffel GC is the only GC I know that performs a GC on exit. BDW does not allow it.

So now the Liberty Eiffel mock framework disables the GC on exit.

Lo and behold, after almost a month, pwd tests pass again!

Happy coding indeed.