The problem is that your object is in a global variable and so survives to global destruction. During global destruction Perl just goes and destroys things in an essentially random order.

This could be considered a bug in Perl (even though it was documented) and will be fixed in Perl 5.8. However note that the fix depends heavily upon the fact that Perl uses reference counting, and not true garbage collection. It would not be safe to assume that Perl 6 will necessarily have reliable support for expected destruction mechanics.

In Perl 5.6 you could work around the issue by keeping track of created objects through WeakRefs and then in an END block destroying everything that didn't clean itself up.

You might think that you could just have the ini object be responsible for cleaning itself up, regardless of whether you had a tied interface to it or not. Unfortunately data that it depends upon might be cleaned up before it is, leading to data corruption. So you are just moving the problem around, but to really solve it you need to guarantee that the destruction happens before global destruction is hit.

In reply to Re (tilly) 1: Tie & Destroy, OOP by tilly
in thread Tie & Destroy, OOP by Flame

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