Destructor - does it get called if the app crashes

Question

Does a destructor get called if the app crashes? If it\'s an unhandled exception I\'m guessing it does, but what about more serious errors, or something like a user killing

Answer 1

I don't even know C#, but based on my experiences with other programming languages I would guess: If an app crashes, that means there's something seriously wrong with it. Incorrect memory handling etc. It would be strange for any programming language to try to execute destructors/deallocators/finalizers/... in such a case. Things would probably just go more wrong ;)

Update: (forgot to try to answer your other questions) again, not C#-specific, but typically there is no guarantee that destructors/deallocators/finalizers/... actually get called. The reason for this is that when a process quits it is much easier and more efficient to simply "zap" the memory block used for the process than to run its destructors etc. to clean up the memory.

I'm not sure how to answer your last question without going into too much technical detail. There are several ways in which garbage collectors can be designed and made to run, the easiest is that garbage collection stops the current process and continues it when it's done, although it is also possible (but more difficult) to have garbage collectors which run concurrently with processes whose memory they are collecting.

You may want to read up on garbage collection theory to better understand all of this. There's actually a whole site about just this topic: www.memorymanagement.org.