Finalizers for Emacs Lisp

NOTE: Emacs 25 directly supports finalizers via make-finalizer. Only use this package if you must support Emacs 24 or earlier.

This package provides finalizers for Emacs Lisp objects. Objects registered with this package will have a specified finalizer function run immediately after that object is garbage collected.

The API has one function: finalize-register. It accepts an object, a finalizer, and arguments to be passed to the finalizer. The object being finalized will be unavailable to the finalizer.

This package works by taking advantage of weak references and post-gc-hook.

See also: Emacs Lisp Object Finalizers

Usage

Use delete-process as a finalizer to clean up a leftover process.

(require 'cl-lib)
(require 'finalize)

(cl-defstruct (pinger (:constructor pinger--create))
  process host)

(defun pinger-create (host)
  (let* ((process (start-process "pinger" nil "ping" host))
         (object (pinger--create :process process :host host)))
    (finalize-register object #'delete-process process)
    object))

(setf pinger (pinger-create "localhost"))
;; => [cl-struct-pinger #<process pinger> "localhost"]

(get-process "pinger")
;; => #<process pinger>

;; Allow object to be garbage collected.
(setf pinger nil)
(garbage-collect)

;; Process has been automatically cleaned up by the finalizer.
(get-process "pinger")
;; => nil

Or using the finalizable EIEIO mixin class, which calls finalize on a copy of the original object after garbage collection.

(require 'eieio)
(require 'finalizable)

(defclass pinger (finalizable)
  ((process :initarg :process :reader pinger-process)
   (host :initarg :host :reader pinger-host)))

(defun pinger-create (host)
  (make-instance 'pinger
                 :process (start-process "ping" nil "ping" host)
                 :host host))

(defmethod finalize ((pinger pinger))
  (delete-process (pinger-process pinger)))

Closure Caveat

Be mindful when using lexical scope and passing a lambda to finalize-register. Uncompiled lambdas capture their entire environment, which almost certainly includes the object subject to finalization. This will backfire and keep the object alive indefinitely. This situation will only work correctly when your function is byte-compiled, which will provide precise lexical environment capture.