Most use cases I've personally seen for weak events would be satisfied by a
WeakMap of weak event target -> event handler. Having the event handler
itself be weak instead of the event target seems strange to me; it
introduces a bunch of nondeterministic behavior that isn't desirable -
sometimes you'll free all your references to a handler and it'll fire
anyway, because it hasn't been collected. It also introduces the potential
for accidentally freeing all your references to a handler and having
important behavior not run. If you get proper WRs this should be pretty
easy to build if you want it.
I think the fact that this would make GC behavior observable through the
execution/non-execution of event handlers probably makes it some sort of
security hole in the same way that WRs are, but I'm not sure - I've never
fully understood the threat posed by that information leak.
-kg
On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 2:55 AM, Marius Gundersen <gunder...@gmail.com>wrote:
> I tried posting this before, but it seems to have gotten lost on the
> internet.
>
> One thing which is impossible to make in JavaScript today is a weakly
> referenced event listener system. In such a system an event listener is not
> strongly referenced by the event system, so events are only dispatched to
> it as long as another object holds a reference to it. For example:
>
>
> //some weak event system, could be global or created with constructor
> var events = new WeakEventSystem();
>
> (function(){
> //This object only exists inside this IIFE, not outside it
> var myObject = {
> handler: function(event){
> console.log("handle event: " + event);
> }
> };
>
> //add a listener to events, but events only has a weak reference to it
> events.addEventListener("someEvent", myObject.handler);
>
> //the following causes the handler above to be called, resulting in
> output on the console
> events.dispatchEvent("someEvent", {params:"someParams"});
>
> })();
>
> //myObject does not exist anymore
> //the following does not output anything on the console
> events.dispatchEvent("someEvent", {params:"someParams"});
>
> In this example the event system does not hold a strong reference to the
> listener/handler function, so if nothing else has a reference to the
> handler function, it is garbage collected.
>
> Any thoughts on this, as an alternative to the more general (and low
> level) weak references?
>
> Marius Gundersen
>
> _______________________________________________
> es-discuss mailing list
> es-discuss@mozilla.org
> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
>
>
--
-kg
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