Hi, first post, so please excuse any clumsiness. As a developer of large scale in-browser web apps, I frequently face memory management issues. These issues apply to both managing DOM elements (which I appreciate is beyond the scope of ECMA) but also to managing objects within the script context.
I also appreciate that memory management is implementation specific, but I would also assume that any direct calls to the memory management system would be part of the language syntax. I believe the problems I am faced with are common to many other developers, and, as web applications become more complex, they will become increasingly prevalent. Basically I would like to suggest three methods: obj.kill() obj.swapOut() obj.swapIn() These are pretty self-explanatory. obj.kill() would erase the object and immediately release any memory used by the object obj.swapOut() would swap out and release any memory used by the obj obj.swapIn() would bring the object back. References to swapped-out objects would automatically trigger their swapIn() method. The necessity for these last two methods arises when the application has downloaded a large quantity of information which it does not currently need – but may well do in the future. The built-in garbage collector has no way of knowing the space occupied by these objects could be temporarily freed-up. It makes more sense to 'store' this information locally as a memory map than either using some local storage service (database, gears etc) if available or, as developers are currently forced to do, de-reference the object and re-request it at again later (incurring both a latency and bandwidth cost). The requirement for obj.kill() arises when the developer/application knows for sure that a given object is no longer required. It's true that if the object has been completely de-referenced it will be picked-up (eventually) by the garbage collector, but it would be nice to be able to force this behavior. I hope the above makes some sense, and, apart from re-emphasizing the practical utility of the above suggestions, I think I'll leave it there. Thanks, David Semeria _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
