solved Disposing a mesh

[kurhlaa]

Hi,

On a Stackoverflow found an advice to set the mesh variable to null after the dispose call (to tell the GC he can collect). Something like:

ball.dispose();
ball = null;

... is this needed nowadays or is already implemented in BJS ?

[brianzinn]

It's not BJS specific, but JavaScript and is needed.  As long as there is something in memory pointing at your object then it cannot be released from memory.  If you are creating a lot of objects and not cleaning up then you will get a large memory footprint or memory leak.  The Garbage Collector can't collect objects that have references - it can only collect "garbage" or unreachable objects.  So, if your ball variable is a reference that leaves scope then it is also cleaned up, so you don't need to set to null.   Good practice to set variables to null and avoid global references.

edit: A disposed mesh it is removed from the scene, so I think you just need to make sure you don't have any references in your own code.  BabylonJS takes care of references in framework for you:
https://github.com/BabylonJS/Babylon.js/blob/7112a6542efc8aeb26c8b7b6568c61535716c01a/src/Mesh/babylon.abstractMesh.ts#L1424

NOTE: dispose() has two (for AbstractMesh) optional parameters:
doNotRecurse?: boolean, disposeMaterialAndTextures: boolean = false
So, you can be more specific when disposing with your intentions.