On 11/01/2013 09:42 AM, Bobby Holley wrote: > From the proposal: > > Note that makeWeakRef is not safe for general access since it grants access >> to the non-determinism inherent in observing garbage collection. > > What does that mean? That they don't expect this to be exposed to the web? > In that case, why bother speccing it, and why would we need to be concerned > with implementing it?
Yeah, that's some very critical weasel-wording in the strawman. "Let's add this to the language, but not expose it to things it shouldn't be exposed to." Huh? > FWIW, I strongly believe that we should refuse to implement specs that make > GC effects any more observable than they already are on the web. Why? I agree, but only for some general reasons and some dimly-remembered reasons that I've encountered in the past where the implications turned out to be far worse than I would have initially thought. I'd really like to have a crisp explanation of exactly *why* exposing GC behavior is bad, because otherwise I feel like people will end up deciding they can live with the minor drawbacks they can think of, and proceed forward with something truly awful. (Like, for example, exposing the current strawman to general web content.) And there really are compelling use cases for having this sort of stuff. As Kevin Gadd said (I think it was him), people are reimplementing garbage collection over typed arrays, in JS, just to gain this level of control. We need to know why, in order to provide something reasonable for whatever those specific use cases happen to be. _______________________________________________ dev-tech-js-engine-internals mailing list dev-tech-js-engine-internals@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-js-engine-internals
