What do to with finalize in our Java code

[iboB]

finalize has been deprecated for a long time and marked for removal recently. Some java implementations threaten to stop calling finalize altogether in the future. Our code relies on it and, in truth, since we wrap shared_ptr, it's actually a good fit for us in spite of all discussions about how using finalizers in Java is bad.

What can we do:

• Ignore this and suppress the warnings. Our main target platform Android does implement finalizers. All jvm implementations still do implement it. As mentioned it is actually a good fit for our particular use case.
• Use Cleaner. It basically runs a thread in the background which calls callbacks (manually registered by us) when our objects become unreachable.
• Use Phantom references. It's the most powerful way of dealing with manual cleanup in Java. It requires much more boilerplate than Cleaner but in this case we control the disposal thread ourselves.
• Something else?

[IvanFilipov]

With little to no expertise on the topic & a few minutes of reading the links, my vote goes to Cleaner.

[iboB]

This topic is now mute, as we decided to go for manual resource management