On Jan 6, 2007, at 1:16 AM, Mars Saxman wrote:
It's actually pretty trivial to implement weak references with a
plugin, all
you need to do is return the object without locking it.
This is trivial only because it leaves the hard part of the problem
unsolved. When the object reaches the end of its life, all of these
fake "weak references" will become dangling references, pointing at
an object which no longer exists. Breaking the memory management
system like this is not a good idea unless you have too much free
time and want to spend it solving tricky bugs.
Surely, it would still be useful if you know about this and take
account of it.
In particular, if you know where all the dangling references to an
object are going to be, you can delete them in that object's
destructor. I would imagine that most designs that could benefit weak
references could do this reasonably easily.
What I would like to see is the ability to write our own weak
reference implementation. What would suffice for this is the ability
to get an object from its ID and vice-versa. This way, we could keep
a "reference" to an object as an integer. It would be up to grown-up
programmers to use this intelligently eg in the manner discussed
above, to delete such "references" in an object's destructor.
Not perfect, but close enough to implement a lot of things that are
flat-out impossible right now without explicit memory management (UGH!).
Unless we're going to get weak references soon, please consider
giving us this.
Regards,
Guyren G Howe
Relevant Logic LLC
guyren-at-relevantlogic.com ~ http://relevantlogic.com
REALbasic, PHP, Ruby/Rails, Python programming
PostgreSQL, MySQL database design and consulting
Technical writing and training
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