Where did variable = null as “object destroying” come from?

Question

Working on a number of legacy systems written in various versions of .NET, across many different companies, I keep finding examples of the following pattern:

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Answer 1

It comes from C++ code especially smart pointers. In that case it's rougly equivalent to a .Dispose() in C#.

It's not a good practice, at most a developer's instinct. There is no real value by assigning null in C#, except may be helping the GC to break a circular reference.