Give in to the ARC side

I thought I’d take a few moments (or more) to answer some questions regarding the just introduced Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) mechanism to Delphi on mobile platforms (namely iOS in XE4, and Android in a future release). Among some sectors of our customer base there seems to be some long-running discussions and kvetching about this change. I will also say that among many other sectors of our customer base, it’s been greeted with marked enthusiasm. Let’s start with some history…

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

For our long-time Delphi users, ARC is really nothing new. Beginning back in Delphi 2 (early 1996), the first Delphi release targeting Windows 32bit, the Delphi compiler has done ARC. Long-Strings, which broke free from the long standing Turbo Pascal limit of 255 characters, introduced the Delphi developer to the whole concept of ARC. Until then, strings (using the semi-reserved word “string”) had been declared and allocated “in-place” and were limited to a maximum of 255 characters. You could declare a string type with less than 255 characters by using the “string[<1-255>]” type syntax.

Strings changed from being allocated at compile time to a reference type that pointed to the actual string data in a heap-allocated structure. There are plenty of resources that explain how this works. For the purposes here, the heap-allocated data structure could be shared among many string variables by using a “reference-count” stored within that data structure. This indicated how many variables are pointing to that data. The compiler managed this by calling special RTL helper functions when variables are assigned or leave the current scope. Once the last string reference was removed, the actual heap-allocated structure could be returned to the free memory pool.

Hey this model works pretty well… Oh look! MS’ COM/OLE/ActiveX uses ARC too!

Delphi 3 was a seminal release in the pantheon of Delphi releases. For those who remember history, this is the first Delphi release in which the founder of Turbo Pascal, and the key architect of Delphi, Anders Hejlsberg, was no longer with the company. However, even with the departure of Anders, Delphi 3 saw the release of many new features. Packages and interfaces were major new language enhancements. Specifically interesting were interfaces, which placed support for COM/OLE/ActiveX-Style interfaces directly into the language.

The Delphi compiler already had support and logic for proper handling of an ARC type, strings, so it was an incremental step forward to add such support for interfaces. By adding interface ARC directly into the language, the Delphi developer was freed from the mundane, error-prone task of manually handling the reference counting for COM interfaces. The Delphi developer could focus on the actual business of using and accessing interfaces and COM/ActiveX objects without dealing with all those AddRef/Release calls. Eventually those poor C++ COM developers got a little help through the introduction of “smart pointers”… But for a while, the Delphi developers were able to quietly snicker at those folks working with COM in C++… oh ok, we still do…

Hey, let’s invite dynamic arrays to this party!

Introduced in Delphi 4, dynamic arrays freed developers from having to work with non-range-checked unbounded arrays or deal with the hassles of raw pointers. Sure there are those who get a clear kick out using raw memory locations and mud-wrestling and hog-tying some pointers… Dynamic arrays took a few pages from the string type playbook and applied it an array data type whose elements are now user-defined. Like strings, they too use the ARC model of memory management. This allows the developers to simply set their length and pass them around without worrying about who should manage their memory.

If ARC is good, Garbage Collection is sooo much better…(that’s a joke, son)

For a while, Delphi cruised along pretty well. There was Delphi 5, then a foray into the hot commodity of the time, Linux where the non-Delphi-named Kylix was developed. Delphi 6 unified the whole Windows and Linux experience… however not much really happened on the compiler front other than retargeting the x86 Delphi compiler to generate code fitting for Linux. By the time Delphi 7 was released, work on the Delphi compiler had shifted to targeting .NET (notice I have ignored that whole “oh look! didn’t Borland demonstrate a Delphi compiler targeting the Java VM?” thing… well… um… never-mind…). .NET was the culmination (up to that time) of the efforts of Anders Hejlsberg since he’d left for Microsoft several years prior.

Yes there has been a  lot of discussion over the years about whether or not MS really said that .NET was the “future” of the Windows API… From my recollection, I precisely remember that being explicitly stated from several sectors of the whole MS machine. Given the information at the time, it was clearly prudent for us to look into embracing the “brave new world” of .NET, it’s VM, and whole notion of garbage collection. We’re not mind readers, so regardless of any skepticism about this direction (oh and there was plenty of that), we needed to do something.

Since I have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and having been a first-hand witness and participant in the whole move to .NET, there are some observations and lessons to be learned from that experience. I remember the whole foray into .NET as generating the most number of new and interesting language innovations and enhancements than I’ve seen since Delphi 2. A new compiler backend generating CIL (aka. MSIL), the introduction of class helpers which allow the injection of methods into the scope of an existing class (this was before C# “extension methods” which are very similar, if not more limited than helpers). I also think there were some missteps, which at the time, I know I vehemently defended. Honestly, I would probably have quite the heated discussion if the “me” of now were to ever meet the “me” of then .

Rather than better embrace the .NET platform, we chose to mold that platform into Delphi’s image. This was reinforced by the clearly obvious link between the genesis behind Delphi itself and the genesis of .NET. They both were driven by the same key developer/architect. On several levels this only muddled things up. Rather than embracing GC (I have nothing really against GC, in fact, I find that it enables a lot of really interesting programming models), we chose to, more or less, hide it. This is where the me of now gets to ridicule the me of then.

Let’s look at one specific thing I feel we “got wrong”… Mapping the “Free” method to call IDisposable.Dispose. Yes, at the time this made sense, and I remember saying how great it was because though the magic of class helpers you can call “Free” on any .NET object from Delphi and it would “do the right thing.” Yes, of course it “did the right thing”, at the expense of holding the platform at arm’s length and never really embracing it. Cool your jets… Here, I’m using the term “platform” to refer more to the programming model, and not the built-in frameworks. Not the .NET platform as a whole…People still wrote (including us) their code as if that magic call to Free was still doing what it always has done.

The Free method was introduced onto TObject for the sole purpose of exception safety. It was intended to be used within object destructors. From a destructor, you never directly called Destroy on the instance reference, you would call Free which would check if the instance reference was non-nil and then call Destroy. This was done to simplify the component developer’s (and those that write their own class types) efforts by freeing (no pun intended) them from doing that nil check everywhere. We were very successful in driving home the whole create...try…finally…free coding pattern, which was done because of exceptions. However, that pattern really doesn’t need to use Free, it could have directly called Destroy.

Foo := TMyObj.Create;
try
  {... work with Foo here}
finally
  Foo.Free; {--- Foo.Destroy is just as valid here}
end;

The reason that Foo.Destroy is valid in this instance is because if an exception were raised during the create of the object, it would never enter the try..finally block. We know that if it enters the try..finally block the assignment to Foo has happened and Foo isn’t nil and is now referencing a valid instance (even if it were garbage or non-nil previously).

Under .NET, Free did no such thing as “free” memory… it may have caused the object to “dispose” of some resources because the object implemented the IDisposable interface pattern. We even went so far as to literally translate the destructor of declared classes in Delphi for .NET into the IDisposable pattern, even if all that destructor did was to call free other object instances, and did nothing with any other non-memory resource. IOW, under a GC environment it did a whole lot of nothing. This may sound like heresy to some, but this was a case where the power of the platform was sacrificed at the altar of full compatibility.

Come to the ARC side

What is different now? With XE4, we’ve introduced a Delphi compiler that directly targets the iOS platform and it’s ARM derivative processor. Along with this, ARC has now come to full fruition and is the default manner in which the lifetime of all object instances are managed. This means that all object references are tracked and accounted for. This also means that, like strings, once the number of references drop to 0, the object is fully cleaned up, destroyed and it’s memory is returned to the heap. You can read about this in detail in this whitepaper here.

If you ask many of my coworkers here, they’ll tell you that I will often say, “Names are important.” Names convey not only what something is, but in many cases what it does. In programming this is of paramount importance. The names you choose need to be concise, but also descriptive. Internal jargon shouldn’t be used, nor should some obscure abbreviation be used.

Since the focus of this piece (aside from the stroll down memory lane) is surrounding “Free”, let’s look at it. In this instance, Free is a verb. Free has become, unfortunately, synonymous with Destroy. However that’s not really it’s intent. It was, as stated above, was about writing exception-safe destructors of classes. Writing exception-safe code is also another topic deserving of its own treatment.

Rather than repeat the mistake in Delphi for .NET in how “Free” was handled, Free was simply removed. Yes, you read that right. Free has been removed. “What?” But my code compiles when I call Free! I see it in the RTL source! We know that there is a lot code out there that uses the proverbial create..try..finally..free pattern, so what is the deal!? When considering what to do here, we saw a couple of options. One was to break a lot of code out there and force folks to IFDEF their code, the other was to find a way to make that common pattern still do something reasonable. Let’s analyze that commonly implemented pattern using the example I showed above.

Foo is typically a local variable. The intent of the code above is to ensure that the Foo instance is properly cleaned up. Under ARC, we know that the compiler will ensure that will happen regardless. So what does Foo.Free actually do!? Rather than emit the well known “Unknown identifier” error message, the compiler simply generates code similar to what it will be automatically generated to clean up that instance. In simplistic terms, the Foo.Free; statement is translated to Foo := nil; which is then, later in the compile process, translated to an RTL call to drop the reference. This is, effectively, the same code the compiler will generate in the surrounding function’s epilogue. All this code has done is simply do what was going to happen anyway, just a little earlier. As long as no other references to Foo are taken (typically there isn’t even in Non-ARC code), the Foo.Free line will do exactly what the developer expects!

“But, but, but! wait! My code intended to Free, destroy, deallocate, etc… that instance! Now it’s not!” Are you sure? In all the code I’ve analyzed, which includes a lot of internal code, external open-source, even some massive customer projects used for testing and bug tracking, this pattern is not only common, it’s nearly ubiquitous. On that front we’ve succeed in “getting the word out” about the need for exception safety. If the transient local instance reference is the only reference, then ARC dictates that once this one and only one reference is gone, the object will be destroyed and de-allocated as expected. Semantically, your code remains functioning in the same manner as before.

To steal a line from The Matrix, “You have to realize the truth… there is no Free”.

Wait… but my class relies on the destructor running at that point!

Remember the discussion above about our handling of IDisposable under Delphi for .NET? We considered doing something similar… implement some well-known interface, place your disposal code in a Dispose method and then query for the interface and call if present. Yuck! That’s a lot of work to, essentially, duplicate what many folks already have in their destructors. What if you could force the execution of the destructor without actually returning the instance memory to the heap? Any reference to the instance would remain valid, but will be referencing a “disposed” instance (I coined the term a “zombie” instance… it’s essentially dead, but is still shambling around the heap). This is, essentially, the same model as the IDisposable pattern above, but you get it for “free” because you implemented a destructor. For ARC, a new method on TObject was introduced, called DisposeOf.

Why DisposeOf, and not simply Dispose? Well, we wanted to use the term Dispose, however, because Dispose is also a standard function there are some scoping conflicts with existing code. For instance, if you had a destructor that called the Dispose standard function on a typed pointer to release some memory allocated using the New() standard function, it would fail to compile because the “Dispose” method on TObject would be “closer in scope” than the globally scoped Dispose. Bummer… So DisposeOf it is.

We’ve found, in practice, and after looking at a lot of code (we do have many million lines of Delphi code at our disposal, and most of it isn’t ours), it became clear that the more deterministic nature of ARC vs. pure GC, the need to actively dispose of an instance on-demand was a mere fraction of the cases. In the vast majority (likely >90%) can simply let the system work. Especially in legacy code where the above discussed create..try..finally..free pattern is used. The need for calling DisposeOf explicitly is more the exception than the rule.

So what else does DisoseOf solve? It is very common among various Delphi frameworks (VCL and FireMonkey included), to place active notification or list management code within the constructor and destructor of a class. The Owner/Owned model of TComponent is a key example of such a design. In this case, the existing component framework design relies on many activities other than simple “resource management” to happen in the destructor.

TComponent.Notification() is a key example of such a thing. In this case, the proper way to “dispose” a component, is to use DisposeOf. A TComponent derivative isn’t usually a transient instance, rather it is a longer-lived object which is also surrounded by a whole system of other component instances that make up things such as forms, frames and datamodules. In this instance, use DisposeOf is appropriate.

For class instances that are used transiently, there is no need for any explicit management of the instance. The ARC system will handle it. Even if you have legacy code using the create..try..finally..free pattern, in the vast majority of cases you can leave that pattern in place and the code will continue to function as expected. If you wanted to write more ARC-aware code, you could remove the try..finally altogether and rely on the function epilogue to manage that instance.

Feel the power of the ARC side.

“Ok, so what is the point? So you removed Free, added DisposeOf… big deal. My code was working just fine so why not just keep the status quo?” Fair question. There is a multi-layered answer to that. One part of the answer involves the continuing evolution of the language. As new and more modern programming styles and techniques are introduced, there should be no reason the Delphi language cannot adopt such things as well. In many cases, these new techniques rely on the existence of some sort of automatic resource/memory management of class instances.

One such feature is operator overloading. By allowing operators on instances, the an expression may end up creating several “temporary” instances that are referenced by “temporary” compiler-created variables inaccessible to the developer. These “temporary” variable must be managed so that instances aren’t improperly “orphaned” causing a memory leak. Relying on the same management mechanism that all other instances use, keeps the compiler, the language, and the runtime clean and consistent.

As the language continues to evolve, we now have a more firm basis on which to build even more interesting functionality. Some things under consideration are enhancements such as fully “rooting” the type system. Under such a type system, all types are, effectively, objects which descend from a single root class. Some of this work is already under way, and some of the syntactical usages are even available today. The addition of “helper types” for non-structured types is intended to give the “feeling” of a rooted type system, where expressions such as “42.ToString();” is valid. When a fully rooted type system is introduced, such an expression will continue to work as expected, however, there will now be, effectively, a real class representing the “42” integer type. Fully rooting the type system will enable many other things that may not be obvious, such as making generics, and type constraints even more powerful.

Other possibilities include adding more “functional programming” or “declarative programming” elements to the language. LINQ is a prime example of functional and declarative programming elements added to an imperative language.

Another very common thing to do with a rooted type system is to actively move simple intrinsic type values to the heap using a concept of “boxing”. This entails actually allocating a “wrapper” instance, which happens to actually be the object that represents the intrinsic type. The “value” is assigned to this wrapper and now you can pass this reference around as any old object (usually as the “root” class, think TObject here). This allows any thing that can reference an object to also reference a simple type. “Unboxing” is the process by which this is reversed and the previously “boxed” value is extracted from the heap-allocated instance.

What ARC would enable here is that you can still interact with the “boxed” value as if it were still a mere value without worrying about who is managing the life-cycle of the instance on the heap. Once the value is “unboxed” and all references to the containing heap-instance are released, the memory is then returned to the heap for reuse.

The key thing to remember here: this is all possible with a natively compiled language without the need for any kind of virtual machine or runtime compilation. It is still strongly and statically typed. In short, the power and advantages gained by “giving in to the ARC side” will become more apparent as we continue to work on the Delphi language… and I’ve not even mentioned some of the things we’re working on for C++…