does php have a garbage collector?

tc61380

can't find any mention of this on their site...

zingbats

Can you be more specific

tc61380

what i mean is,

if i create objects, do i have to explicitly destroy them? Or does php have some sort of mechanism that clears out unused memory, like Java?

Since all the query results are stored in objects....thought I'd make sure.

Any documentation links would be greatly appreciated too 😕

tc61380

😕

zingbats

Objects don't need to be destroyed. They get removed on there own

Weedpacket

PHP frees memory as soon as there are no longer any references to its content. That happens at the end of the script if not sooner.

There are no explicit destructors for specifying finalisation code in PHP4 (for things like cleaning up interaction with external resources), but the PEAR extensions provide emulation for this. Also, PHP5 (in beta) does implement destructors (and a bunch of other OO things).

Drakla

Coming from years of C++, php cleaning its own knickers freaked me for ages. I had a massive distrust of it destroying variables in that "You will remember to tape Gamesmaster for me, won't you?" type way. Programming php still feels like playing mud-pies. I still take it far more seriously than VB though!

VB = Sticklebricks.

Weedpacket

Originally posted by Drakla
Coming from years of C++, php cleaning its own knickers freaked me for ages.

Nah, any RTE that does dynamic allocation should do its own cleaning.

If it makes you happy (probably won't), PHP won't GC circular references because it uses a plain reference-counting system. PHP wasn't designed to be running so long or processing so much data that that becomes a problem, but with PHP being used for applications programming more that may be set to change in future.

Drakla

Actually as soon as I learnt about the reference counting it all made sense - then in a mysql class I wrote I actually started using my own reference count for each of the connections because if you make another DB object and it connects with the same details php gives you back the same resource ID - then if one of the objects closes it will actually close it for the rest of them, so the class only really does mysql_close when the ref goes back to zero. So I have come round to it, but it still feels weird being babysat by a higher force.