in JavaScript, when finished with an object created via new ActiveXObject, do I need to set it to null?

Question

In a Javascript program that runs within WSH and creates objects, let's say Scripting.FileSystemObject or any arbitrary COM object, do I need to set the variable to null when I'm finished with it? Eg, am I recommended to do this:

var fso = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
var fileStream = fso.openTextFile(filename);
fso = null;  // recommended?  necessary? 
... use fileStream here ...
fileStream.Close();
fileStream = null;  // recommended? necessary?

Is the effect different than just letting the vars go out of scope?

Moncear

Answer 1

Assigning null to an object variable will decrement the reference counter so that the memory management system can discard the resource - as soon as it feels like it. The reference counter will be decremented automagically when the variable goes out of scope. So doing it manually is a waste of time in almost all cases.

In theory a function using a big object A in its first and another big object B in its second part could be more memory efficient if A is set to null in the middle. But as this does not force the mms to destroy A, the statement could still be a waste.

You may get circular references if you do some fancy class design. Then breaking the circle by hand may be necessary - but perhaps avoiding such loops in the first place would be better.

There are rumours about ancient database access objects with bugs that could be avoided by zapping variables. I wouldn't base my programming rules on such voodoo.

(There are tons of VBscript code on the internet that is full of "Set X = Nothing"; when asked, the authors tend to talk about 'habit' and other languages (C, C++))

Con

Answer 2

Building on what Ekkehard.Horner has said...

Scripts like VBScript, JScript, and ASP are executed within an environment that manages memory for you. As such, explicitly setting an object reference to Null or Empty, does not necessarily remove it from memory...at least not right away. (In practice it's often nearly instantaneous, but in actuality the task is added to a queue within the environment that is executed at some later point in time.) In this regard, it's really much less useful than you might think.

In compiled code, it's important to clean up memory before a program (or section of code in some cases) ends so that any allocated memory is returned to the system. This prevents all kinds of problems. Outside of slowly running code, this is most important when a program exits. In scripting environments like ASP or WSH, memory management takes care of this cleanup automatically when a script exits. So all object references are set to null for you even if you don't do it explicitly yourself which makes the whole mess unnecessary in this instance.

As far as memory concerns during script execution, if you are building arrays or dictionary objects large enough to cause problems, you've either gone way beyond the scope of scripting or you've taken the wrong approach in your code. In other words, this should never happen in VBScript. In fact, the environment imposes limits to the sizes of arrays and dictionary objects in order to prevent these problems in the first place.

Briney

Answer 3

If you have long running scripts which use objects at the top/start, which are unneeded during the main process, setting these objects to null may free up memory sooner and won't do any harm. As mentioned by other posters, there may be little practical benefit.

Culbertson