D2 weak references
Jason House
jason.james.house at gmail.com
Wed Apr 15 11:29:16 PDT 2009
Stewart Gordon Wrote:
> Jason House wrote:
> > Does anyone have a weak reference library for D2?
> >
> > Without that, hash tables and search trees don't mix. I'm hoping that
> > a weak reference library can be merged into druntime.
>
> Weak references don't fit well into D at the moment. It's been talked
> about before (albeit not in reference to D2 in particular):
>
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/713.html
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/Weak_references._69761.html
>
> and probably others.
I participated in the more recent of those threads.
I feel like I have a great application for weak pointers. The best manual memmory management of search trees and hashtables is to do mark and sweep. That should sound awfully familiar...
> But I think that, if D gained weak references as a built-in feature it
> would work well and be useful. A decent library implementation may
> otherwise be possible if D's GC API gains:
> - an explicit pinning mechanism
> - a means of creating listeners on the GC
>
> Stewart.
Everything is pinned at the moment and Tango's GC (and therefore druntime's GC) has an explicit notification mechanism. The big advantage to having a weak ref implementation in the runtime is that it'll evolve with the GC as well as pool people's bug fixes / ports.
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