Recently, there was a discussion about "the rise of functional languages" over on <a href="http://lwn.net/">Linux weekly news</a>, in which one of the participant claimed that one of the major reasons why nobody uses functional languages in industrial settings would be the lack of explicit resource handling (where a resource is some supposedly "alien" object in the system, say a database handle or something like that). What he was referring to was the inability to run code on allocating/deallocating a piece of resource. Of course, some people pointed him to various solutions, in particular I recurred to the usual WITH-* style-macros in which one would nest the access to the data while at the same time hiding all what one would do on allocation/de-allocation. His reply went something along the lines that such objects may need to be long-lived (thus a WITH-macro is inappropriate) and that the only resort would be the garbage collector and that there simply is no way of running code at a guaranteed (de-allocation) time. I have to admit that I have no idea how I could code around that problem in Common Lisp (garbage collection even isn't a defined term in the ANSI specification of CL, and I'm very sure I haven't seen any mention of allocation/deallocation in it).
Now, some months later, there is a discussion in comp.lang.lisp on the topic of “portable finalizers” and Rainer Joswig pointed to this chapter in the Lisp machine manual which talks about explicit resource handling the lisp machine. From the excerpt, I can’t judge whether resources are first-class CLOS objects and hence the functions to handle them are generic functions, but if so that would actually allow running code on deallocating a resource, of course with the price of having to handle allocation/deallocation manually. I really wonder if any of todays CL implementations offers the same or at least similar functionality?
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