Weak references.

[Sean Kelly]

== Quote from Jason House (jason.james.house at gmail.com)'s article
> Sean Kelly Wrote:
> > Thanks for any investigation you do for this.  If you can find a bug in Tango, I'd be
> > happy to fix it, but I'm too busy to do the research myself at the moment.
> I have a vested interest in it... I want my code to work ;)
> Just to be clear, what is enough to proclaim stuff as a bug in Tango?

Ideally, any bug report will contain a simple repro and/or mention of where the actual
problem is in Tango.  But we see ambiguous bug reports or things that, after investigation,
turn out to be compiler problems and the like.  But the easier you can make things on our
end, the faster the problem is likely to be fixed :-)

> For the failed assert: prior to collect, show a lack of lingering references through disassembly?

What I'd do to diagnose this is rebuild the Tango runtime with debug reporting
turned on for the GC, possibly adding something to print the address of all
blocks being collected (if that doesn't exist already).  We know that weakptr
data isn't being collected on Win32... the question is why.


> For a runtime crash: Isn't any crash in core libraries used by Tango a Tango bug?

Not necessarily.  We've seen a bunch of crashes that GDB reported were in the runtime
that actually turned out to be compiler bugs in GDC, or in some cases errors in the
user program that ended up surfacing as runtime code exploding.  But in theory you're
right.

> For whatever I can prove to be a Tango bug, I'll submit a ticket.

Thank you :-)


Sean