On the topic of Object Immortality

Let's say I have the following class:

public class Immortal
{
    private static System.Collections.ArrayList immortals = new System.Collections.ArrayList();

    public Immortal()
    {
    }

    ~Immortal()
    {
        // rise from your grave!
        immortals.Add(this);
        System.Gc.ReRegisterForFinalize(this);
    }
}

If I then do the following:

Immortal being = new Immortal();

being = null;

System.GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers();

Will the program hang waiting for an immortal object to die?

I know that the docs don't guarantee that WaitForPendingFinalizers will ever return, but I'm just curious if this will hang it.

I imagine immortals.Add(this) would end up throwing an exception if it was to cause some sort of loop.

Finalization is pretty fragile in CLR1.1 There are lots of things you can do to break the one and only finalizer thread, especially if you use synchronisation anywhere in the code.

Obviously if you want an object to live forever you just hald a ref to it in a static variable.

I think this practice is more commonly referred to "object resurrection." (Seriously, google it.)

Being the junior design patterns guy -- i'd have to suggest using a "singleton" pattern...

-cseeger