Re: Garbage collection (was Re: JWZ on s/Java/Perl/)

[Tim Bunce]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 02:26:10PM -0500, Uri Guttman wrote:
> >>>>> "TB" == Tim Bunce <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
>   TB> As a part of that the weak reference concept, bolted recently into
>   TB> perl5, could be made more central in perl6.
> 
>   TB> Around 92.769% of the time circular references are known to be
>   TB> circular by the code that creates them (like a 'handy' ref back to
>   TB> a parent node).  Having a weakref, or similar, operator in the
>   TB> language would help greatly.
> 
> i second this. i am doing just what tim mentions. i have a child and
> parent object referring back to each other for callback purposes. the
> parent needs to own the child and the child has to have a parent ref to
> make a method callback in the parent. there is no way out of creating
> circular refs in that situation. i have to do an explicit object
> shutdown so i don't leak ram. this isn't a big problem in stem since you
> have to explicitly unregister stuff as well (that can't be done with
> scope exit) but it would still be nice not to have to worry about the
> ref loops.

So why not use the WeakRef module (or whatever it's called)?

Tim.