Could I present another example where WeakRef are required. I am writing an object management layer similar to what exist in other language and systems. One of the requirement is uniquing so that each object exist only once in memory. Let say I retrieve a company and its employees and later retrieve a company project and its participants. I need the members of the employee list and the members of the participant list to point to the same objects. The other requirement is not to leak, if an object is only accessible from within the management layer it should be candidate for garbage collection.
With the current ECMAScript I have multiple problem implementing this. Each object has a unique identifier (UUID) but as strings cannot be used as keys in WeakMap I have to keep a reference to objects in a regular Map. This causes a major leak… In order to plug it we have to rely on the user notifying the management layer for checkin/checkout of objects doing ref counting. This is clumsy. I had a similar design working with WeafRef in Java with no constrains on the user. Why could we not do this with JS? WeakRef would solve this issue quite naturally. I understand that this would make GC observable and there is a security concern. We should however strike a balance between usability and security. I am no security expert but it looks to me that in this case we could tilt the balance a little more in favour of usability. _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
