Swarms, zones, dropping, and resource management.

[Albert-Jan Brouwer]

Resource management in Swarm is confusing me somewhat. From the documentation
I gather that a swarm functions as a container for objects such that upon
dropping the swarm, all objects allocated within it are dropped as well.

E.g., in the SimpleExperBug tutorial the following method is defined:

- dropModel
{
  // The model has finished and we've extracted the data we need from
  // it. We drop the modelSwarm's activity, and then drop the modelSwarm
  // itself which drops of the objects built by modelSwarm

  [[modelSwarm getActivity] drop];
  [modelSwarm drop];

  return self;
}

However when I override the drop method of one of the objects contained in
the model swarm like so;

- (void)drop
{
  [super drop];
  printf("Goodbye cruel world...\n");
}

no goodbyes are given, that is, it appears as if the the drop method of
the objects contained in the swarm being dropped is not called (under
swarm 1.3.1). What is going on here?, specifically:

- Is drop being called on an object when a containing swarm or zone is
  dropped?

- Is the drop method intended to be overridden? I would have assumed
  it to be the proper place to do clean up of resources not bound up
  with a zone, e.g. closing a file opened with fopen() by the object
  to be destoyed.

- If no drop is called, is the memory corresponding to the objects
  cleaned up nevertheless?

- If the memory is cleaned up, is this done by dropping the zone
  corresponding to the swarm within which all objects within the swarm
  are supposed to have been allocated? Presumably this recurses to any
  sub swarms / zones within a swarm?

- Is a new zone created whenever a new swarm is created or does a swarm
  inherit the zone passed on as a parameter to the create/createBegin
  method causing its instantiation?

Best regards,

Albert-Jan

---
Albert-Jan Brouwer, department of molecular physics, Leiden University.
EMail: address@hidden or address@hidden


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