.NET - Finalizers and exit(0)

Question

I have a .NET C# / C++ app which uses a call to exit(0) (from <stdlib.h>) in a thread in order to terminate.

The strange part is, under some circumstances, the finalizers of the managed objects are called right after the call to exit, and in other circumstances, they are not called at all.

The circumstances are pretty deterministic - the app calls some methods from an external plugin dll (written in unmanaged C) during its lifetime.
If I use dll A, the finalizers are always called.
If I use dll B, the finalizers are never called.

What's the expected behaviour of finalizers in case of an exit(0) call? (if there is any expected -and documented- behaviour)

Can the calls to the external dlls change some global setting that may impact the way the process is terminated?

Answer 1

Chris Brumme talked about how finalizers are handled during process shutdown:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/cbrumme/archive/2004/02/20/77460.aspx (look at the section titled "V1 & V1.1 Finalization Guarantees").

The bottom line is that there seems to be very little in the way of guarantees for finalizers running at shutdown, but I'm not sure what the DLLs may be doing to causing things to act differently (maybe it 's that one DLL is doing something in DLL_PROCESS_DETACH processing that's giving .NET the opportunity to process finalizers.

The article is for .NET 1.x - I'm not sure how much of this has changed in .NET 2.0 or later.