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Explicit resource management #366
Description
This GitHub issue is for collecting web developer signals for Explicit resource management.
The using and await using declarations and the dispose and asyncDispose symbols manage the lifecycle of resources such as file handles and streams. The DisposableStack and AsyncDisposableStack objects can group, dispose, and coordinate dependencies between multiple disposable resources.
Browser support
- Chrome 134 (Mar 4, 2025)
- Chrome Android 134 (Mar 4, 2025)
- Edge 134 (Mar 6, 2025)
- Firefox 141 (Jul 22, 2025)
- Firefox for Android 141 (Jul 22, 2025)
- Safari: not supported
- Safari on iOS: not supported
Give us feedback
If you're pressed for time, but you want this feature to be available in all browsers, please give this issue a thumbs up 👍 reaction.
However, a much better guide for us is to know how you'd use this feature, and what you're having to do in the meantime. This helps us judge the priority versus other features.
Copy the template below in a comment, and add the details that matter to you.
## What I want to do with this feature
<!-- Add your specific use-cases, even if they seem obvious to you. -->
## What I'm having to do in the meantime
<!--
Are you having to use another feature instead, a polyfill, or is it blocking you completely?
Why are the alternatives worse than using this feature?
-->All comments are expected to adhere to the Code of Conduct.
Learn more
You can learn more about this feature here:
Activity
akaltar commentedon Dec 13, 2025
What I want to do with this feature
Lots of resources on the web end up being stateful, from the DOM itself, to WebAudio components and WebGL components. It'd make managing them much more developer-friendly
What I'm having to do in the meantime
I'm manually managing this in different ways depending on the context, but it's more error-prone, and more diverse across different frameworks and systems. It's hard to always make sure to clean things up, it's very difficult to know what even is stateful. I think this proposal could pave the way to a much more robust web
1valdis commentedon Jan 20, 2026
What I want to do with this feature
As part of development for the Satellite.js library, I'm creating a WebAssembly option to propagate orbits of satellites, instead of just pure JS one. For this I make use of unmanaged memory in C++. I expose the results of propagation as views into WASM memory. To use orbit propagation in WASM, user needs to instantiate a class; in its constructor the class allocates unmanaged memory to work with it on hot path later. This memory needs to be
freed when the user is done. In the future major version of the library, as part of the WASM API, the objects that work with unmanaged memory will use Explicit Resource Management to clean up the unmanaged memory after themselves when they leave the scope, and users will be encouraged to declare such objects withusing.What I'm having to do in the meantime
As an alternative, I expose the explicit
.dispose()method that the users will have to call intry...finally.