Are finalizers guaranteed to be executed in .NET at some point (spare power outages and the like)? I know how GC works and that it is nondeterministic when exactly they'll run.
(The search did not display good answers, so I'm adding this question in high expectation of a merge with the not-so-easy-to-discover actual answers. Apart from that, I already know the answer and am going to add it after a few days in case nobody mentioned it.)
Finalizers may actually be never executed, as Raymond Chen explains. Kind of funny that this question is asked during his annual CLR week, just two days after he explained it :)
For the lazy ones, the (or rather, one) conclusion is:
A correctly-written program cannot assume that finalizers will ever run.
If you are wondering whether you can rely on finalizers, this is already everything you have to know: Don't rely on finalizers.
As Raymond Chen also states in the linked article:
Finalizers are a safety net, not a primary means for resource reclamation.
If you're looking for how to release resources, have a look at the Disposable pattern.
A finalizer may not run, for example, if:
(Note: The time values may have changed over time, but were certainly true some time ago.)
I guess there are a lot more things that can cause finalizers to never run. The bottom line is, other than the quote from Mr. Chen, that finalizers are a safety net that decrease the impact of bugs, because for example resources are released sometime, which is better than never, if you forget to do it explicity.