[javascript] ECMAScript 6 class destructor

I know ECMAScript 6 has constructors but is there such a thing as destructors for ECMAScript 6?

For example if I register some of my object's methods as event listeners in the constructor, I want to remove them when my object is deleted.

One solution is to have a convention of creating a desctructor method for every class that needs this kind of behaviour and manually call it. This will remove the references to the event handlers, hence my object will truly be ready for garbage collection. Otherwise it'll stay in memory because of those methods.

But I was hoping if ECMAScript 6 has something native that will be called right before the object is garbage collected.

If there is no such mechanism, what is a pattern/convention for such problems?

I just came across this question in a search about destructors and I thought there was an unanswered part of your question in your comments, so I thought I would address that.

thank you guys. But what would be a good convention if ECMAScript doesn't have destructors? Should I create a method called destructor and call it manually when I'm done with the object? Any other idea?

If you want to tell your object that you are now done with it and it should specifically release any event listeners it has, then you can just create an ordinary method for doing that. You can call the method something like release() or deregister() or unhook() or anything of that ilk. The idea is that you're telling the object to disconnect itself from anything else it is hooked up to (deregister event listeners, clear external object references, etc...). You will have to call it manually at the appropriate time.

If, at the same time you also make sure there are no other references to that object, then your object will become eligible for garbage collection at that point.

ES6 does have weakMap and weakSet which are ways of keeping track of a set of objects that are still alive without affecting when they can be garbage collected, but it does not provide any sort of notification when they are garbage collected. They just disappear from the weakMap or weakSet at some point (when they are GCed).

FYI, the issue with this type of destructor you ask for (and probably why there isn't much of a call for it) is that because of garbage collection, an item is not eligible for garbage collection when it has an open event handler against a live object so even if there was such a destructor, it would never get called in your circumstance until you actually removed the event listeners. And, once you've removed the event listeners, there's no need for the destructor for this purpose.

I suppose there's a possible weakListener() that would not prevent garbage collection, but such a thing does not exist either.

FYI, here's another relevant question Why is the object destructor paradigm in garbage collected languages pervasively absent?. This discussion covers finalizer, destructor and disposer design patterns. I found it useful to see the distinction between the three.

Edit in 2020 - proposal for object finalizer

There is a Stage 3 EMCAScript proposal to add a user-defined finalizer function after an object is garbage collected.

A canonical example of something that would benefit from a feature like this is an object that contains a handle to an open file. If the object is garbage collected (because no other code still has a reference to it), then this finalizer scheme allows one to at least put a message to the console that an external resource has just been leaked and code elsewhere should be fixed to prevent this leak.

If you read the proposal thoroughly, you will see that it's nothing like a full-blown destructor in a language like C++. This finalizer is called after the object has already been destroyed and you have to predetermine what part of the instance data needs to be passed to the finalizer for it to do its work. Further, this feature is not meant to be relied upon for normal operation, but rather as a debugging aid and as a backstop against certain types of bugs. You can read the full explanation for these limitations in the proposal.

"A destructor wouldn't even help you here. It's the event listeners themselves that still reference your object, so it would not be able to get garbage-collected before they are unregistered."

Not so. The purpose of a destructor is to allow the item that registered the listeners to unregister them. Once an object has no other references to it, it will be garbage collected.

For instance, in AngularJS, when a controller is destroyed, it can listen for a destroy event and respond to it. This isn't the same as having a destructor automatically called, but it's close, and gives us the opportunity to remove listeners that were set when the controller was initialized.

// Set event listeners, hanging onto the returned listener removal functions
function initialize() {
    $scope.listenerCleanup = [];
    $scope.listenerCleanup.push( $scope.$on( EVENTS.DESTROY, instance.onDestroy) );
    $scope.listenerCleanup.push( $scope.$on( AUTH_SERVICE_RESPONSES.CREATE_USER.SUCCESS, instance.onCreateUserResponse ) );
    $scope.listenerCleanup.push( $scope.$on( AUTH_SERVICE_RESPONSES.CREATE_USER.FAILURE, instance.onCreateUserResponse ) );
}

// Remove event listeners when the controller is destroyed
function onDestroy(){
    $scope.listenerCleanup.forEach( remove => remove() );
}

You have to manually "destruct" objects in JS. Creating a destroy function is common in JS. In other languages this might be called free, release, dispose, close, etc. In my experience though it tends to be destroy which will unhook internal references, events and possibly propagates destroy calls to child objects as well.

WeakMaps are largely useless as they cannot be iterated and this probably wont be available until ECMA 7 if at all. All WeakMaps let you do is have invisible properties detached from the object itself except for lookup by the object reference and GC so that they don't disturb it. This can be useful for caching, extending and dealing with plurality but it doesn't really help with memory management for observables and observers. WeakSet is a subset of WeakMap (like a WeakMap with a default value of boolean true).

There are various arguments on whether to use various implementations of weak references for this or destructors. Both have potential problems and destructors are more limited.

Destructors are actually potentially useless for observers/listeners as well because typically the listener will hold references to the observer either directly or indirectly. A destructor only really works in a proxy fashion without weak references. If your Observer is really just a proxy taking something else's Listeners and putting them on an observable then it can do something there but this sort of thing is rarely useful. Destructors are more for IO related things or doing things outside of the scope of containment (IE, linking up two instances that it created).

The specific case that I started looking into this for is because I have class A instance that takes class B in the constructor, then creates class C instance which listens to B. I always keep the B instance around somewhere high above. A I sometimes throw away, create new ones, create many, etc. In this situation a Destructor would actually work for me but with a nasty side effect that in the parent if I passed the C instance around but removed all A references then the C and B binding would be broken (C has the ground removed from beneath it).

In JS having no automatic solution is painful but I don't think it's easily solvable. Consider these classes (pseudo):

function Filter(stream) {
    stream.on('data', function() {
        this.emit('data', data.toString().replace('somenoise', '')); // Pretend chunks/multibyte are not a problem.
    });
}
Filter.prototype.__proto__ = EventEmitter.prototype;
function View(df, stream) {
    df.on('data', function(data) {
        stream.write(data.toUpper()); // Shout.
    });
}

On a side note, it's hard to make things work without anonymous/unique functions which will be covered later.

In a normal case instantiation would be as so (pseudo):

var df = new Filter(stdin),
    v1 = new View(df, stdout),
    v2 = new View(df, stderr);

To GC these normally you would set them to null but it wont work because they've created a tree with stdin at the root. This is basically what event systems do. You give a parent to a child, the child adds itself to the parent and then may or may not maintain a reference to the parent. A tree is a simple example but in reality you may also find yourself with complex graphs albeit rarely.

In this case, Filter adds a reference to itself to stdin in the form of an anonymous function which indirectly references Filter by scope. Scope references are something to be aware of and that can be quite complex. A powerful GC can do some interesting things to carve away at items in scope variables but that's another topic. What is critical to understand is that when you create an anonymous function and add it to something as a listener to ab observable, the observable will maintain a reference to the function and anything the function references in the scopes above it (that it was defined in) will also be maintained. The views do the same but after the execution of their constructors the children do not maintain a reference to their parents.

If I set any or all of the vars declared above to null it isn't going to make a difference to anything (similarly when it finished that "main" scope). They will still be active and pipe data from stdin to stdout and stderr.

If I set them all to null it would be impossible to have them removed or GCed without clearing out the events on stdin or setting stdin to null (assuming it can be freed like this). You basically have a memory leak that way with in effect orphaned objects if the rest of the code needs stdin and has other important events on it prohibiting you from doing the aforementioned.

To get rid of df, v1 and v2 I need to call a destroy method on each of them. In terms of implementation this means that both the Filter and View methods need to keep the reference to the anonymous listener function they create as well as the observable and pass that to removeListener.

On a side note, alternatively you can have an obserable that returns an index to keep track of listeners so that you can add prototyped functions which at least to my understanding should be much better on performance and memory. You still have to keep track of the returned identifier though and pass your object to ensure that the listener is bound to it when called.

A destroy function adds several pains. First is that I would have to call it and free the reference:

df.destroy();
v1.destroy();
v2.destroy();
df = v1 = v2 = null;

This is a minor annoyance as it's a bit more code but that is not the real problem. When I hand these references around to many objects. In this case when exactly do you call destroy? You cannot simply hand these off to other objects. You'll end up with chains of destroys and manual implementation of tracking either through program flow or some other means. You can't fire and forget.

An example of this kind of problem is if I decide that View will also call destroy on df when it is destroyed. If v2 is still around destroying df will break it so destroy cannot simply be relayed to df. Instead when v1 takes df to use it, it would need to then tell df it is used which would raise some counter or similar to df. df's destroy function would decrease than counter and only actually destroy if it is 0. This sort of thing adds a lot of complexity and adds a lot that can go wrong the most obvious of which is destroying something while there is still a reference around somewhere that will be used and circular references (at this point it's no longer a case of managing a counter but a map of referencing objects). When you're thinking of implementing your own reference counters, MM and so on in JS then it's probably deficient.

If WeakSets were iterable, this could be used:

function Observable() {
    this.events = {open: new WeakSet(), close: new WeakSet()};
}
Observable.prototype.on = function(type, f) {
    this.events[type].add(f);
};
Observable.prototype.emit = function(type, ...args) {
    this.events[type].forEach(f => f(...args));
};
Observable.prototype.off = function(type, f) {
    this.events[type].delete(f);
};

In this case the owning class must also keep a token reference to f otherwise it will go poof.

If Observable were used instead of EventListener then memory management would be automatic in regards to the event listeners.

Instead of calling destroy on each object this would be enough to fully remove them:

df = v1 = v2 = null;

If you didn't set df to null it would still exist but v1 and v2 would automatically be unhooked.

There are two problems with this approach however.

Problem one is that it adds a new complexity. Sometimes people do not actually want this behaviour. I could create a very large chain of objects linked to each other by events rather than containment (references in constructor scopes or object properties). Eventually a tree and I would only have to pass around the root and worry about that. Freeing the root would conveniently free the entire thing. Both behaviours depending on coding style, etc are useful and when creating reusable objects it's going to be hard to either know what people want, what they have done, what you have done and a pain to work around what has been done. If I use Observable instead of EventListener then either df will need to reference v1 and v2 or I'll have to pass them all if I want to transfer ownership of the reference to something else out of scope. A weak reference like thing would mitigate the problem a little by transferring control from Observable to an observer but would not solve it entirely (and needs check on every emit or event on itself). This problem can be fixed I suppose if the behaviour only applies to isolated graphs which would complicate the GC severely and would not apply to cases where there are references outside the graph that are in practice noops (only consume CPU cycles, no changes made).

Problem two is that either it is unpredictable in certain cases or forces the JS engine to traverse the GC graph for those objects on demand which can have a horrific performance impact (although if it is clever it can avoid doing it per member by doing it per WeakMap loop instead). The GC may never run if memory usage does not reach a certain threshold and the object with its events wont be removed. If I set v1 to null it may still relay to stdout forever. Even if it does get GCed this will be arbitrary, it may continue to relay to stdout for any amount of time (1 lines, 10 lines, 2.5 lines, etc).

The reason WeakMap gets away with not caring about the GC when non-iterable is that to access an object you have to have a reference to it anyway so either it hasn't been GCed or hasn't been added to the map.

I am not sure what I think about this kind of thing. You're sort of breaking memory management to fix it with the iterable WeakMap approach. Problem two can also exist for destructors as well.

All of this invokes several levels of hell so I would suggest to try to work around it with good program design, good practices, avoiding certain things, etc. It can be frustrating in JS however because of how flexible it is in certain aspects and because it is more naturally asynchronous and event based with heavy inversion of control.

There is one other solution that is fairly elegant but again still has some potentially serious hangups. If you have a class that extends an observable class you can override the event functions. Add your events to other observables only when events are added to yourself. When all events are removed from you then remove your events from children. You can also make a class to extend your observable class to do this for you. Such a class could provide hooks for empty and non-empty so in a since you would be Observing yourself. This approach isn't bad but also has hangups. There is a complexity increase as well as performance decrease. You'll have to keep a reference to object you observe. Critically, it also will not work for leaves but at least the intermediates will self destruct if you destroy the leaf. It's like chaining destroy but hidden behind calls that you already have to chain. A large performance problem is with this however is that you may have to reinitialise internal data from the Observable everytime your class becomes active. If this process takes a very long time then you might be in trouble.

If you could iterate WeakMap then you could perhaps combine things (switch to Weak when no events, Strong when events) but all that is really doing is putting the performance problem on someone else.

There are also immediate annoyances with iterable WeakMap when it comes to behaviour. I mentioned briefly before about functions having scope references and carving. If I instantiate a child that in the constructor that hooks the listener 'console.log(param)' to parent and fails to persist the parent then when I remove all references to the child it could be freed entirely as the anonymous function added to the parent references nothing from within the child. This leaves the question of what to do about parent.weakmap.add(child, (param) => console.log(param)). To my knowledge the key is weak but not the value so weakmap.add(object, object) is persistent. This is something I need to reevaluate though. To me that looks like a memory leak if I dispose all other object references but I suspect in reality it manages that basically by seeing it as a circular reference. Either the anonymous function maintains an implicit reference to objects resulting from parent scopes for consistency wasting a lot of memory or you have behaviour varying based on circumstances which is hard to predict or manage. I think the former is actually impossible. In the latter case if I have a method on a class that simply takes an object and adds console.log it would be freed when I clear the references to the class even if I returned the function and maintained a reference. To be fair this particular scenario is rarely needed legitimately but eventually someone will find an angle and will be asking for a HalfWeakMap which is iterable (free on key and value refs released) but that is unpredictable as well (obj = null magically ending IO, f = null magically ending IO, both doable at incredible distances).

If there is no such mechanism, what is a pattern/convention for such problems?

The term 'cleanup' might be more appropriate, but will use 'destructor' to match OP

Suppose you write some javascript entirely with 'function's and 'var's. Then you can use the pattern of writing all the functions code within the framework of a try/catch/finally lattice. Within finally perform the destruction code.

Instead of the C++ style of writing object classes with unspecified lifetimes, and then specifying the lifetime by arbitrary scopes and the implicit call to ~() at scope end (~() is destructor in C++), in this javascript pattern the object is the function, the scope is exactly the function scope, and the destructor is the finally block.

If you are now thinking this pattern is inherently flawed because try/catch/finally doesn't encompass asynchronous execution which is essential to javascript, then you are correct. Fortunately, since 2018 the asynchronous programming helper object Promise has had a prototype function finally added to the already existing resolve and catch prototype functions. That means that that asynchronous scopes requiring destructors can be written with a Promise object, using finally as the destructor. Furthermore you can use try/catch/finally in an async function calling Promises with or without await, but must be aware that Promises called without await will be execute asynchronously outside the scope and so handle the desctructor code in a final then.

In the following code PromiseA and PromiseB are some legacy API level promises which don't have finally function arguments specified. PromiseC DOES have a finally argument defined.

async function afunc(a,b){
    try {
        function resolveB(r){ ... }
        function catchB(e){ ... }
        function cleanupB(){ ... }
        function resolveC(r){ ... }
        function catchC(e){ ... }
        function cleanupC(){ ... }
        ...
        // PromiseA preced by await sp will finish before finally block.  
        // If no rush then safe to handle PromiseA cleanup in finally block 
        var x = await PromiseA(a);
        // PromiseB,PromiseC not preceded by await - will execute asynchronously
        // so might finish after finally block so we must provide 
        // explicit cleanup (if necessary)
        PromiseB(b).then(resolveB,catchB).then(cleanupB,cleanupB);
        PromiseC(c).then(resolveC,catchC,cleanupC);
    }
    catch(e) { ... }
    finally { /* scope destructor/cleanup code here */ }
}

I am not advocating that every object in javascript be written as a function. Instead, consider the case where you have a scope identified which really 'wants' a destructor to be called at its end of life. Formulate that scope as a function object, using the pattern's finally block (or finally function in the case of an asynchronous scope) as the destructor. It is quite like likely that formulating that functional object obviated the need for a non-function class which would otherwise have been written - no extra code was required, aligning scope and class might even be cleaner.

Note: As others have written, we should not confuse destructors and garbage collection. As it happens C++ destructors are often or mainly concerned with manual garbage collection, but not exclusively so. Javascript has no need for manual garbage collection, but asynchronous scope end-of-life is often a place for (de)registering event listeners, etc..