C# 4.0 Unleashed

How Finalizers Are Run

Now let’s move on to the discussion about their behavior and best practices associated with the use of finalizers. In contrast to C++, finalizers are called by the runtime when the object instance is no longer accessible by user code. The runtime service in charge of their invocation is the garbage collector that’s responsible for releasing memory held by heap-allocated objects at a point after they’ve become unreachable by code. Earlier we discussed the mark-and-sweep mechanism employed by the garbage collector to scan memory, mark objects that are still alive, and collect the ones that cannot be used any longer.

When an object gets garbage collected and it implements a finalizer, that method will be scheduled to be run ...