[Newbies] What is a "weak" reference

[Todd Blanchard]

A weak reference is simply a reference that will not prevent an object  
from being garbage collected.  It is common to use a weak reference in  
back pointers when you know you are having circularities.  It is  
practically a pattern, when building a hierarchy of objects, to make  
the parent pointer in parent child type structures a weak reference.

So how do you make a weak reference? You stick a WeakArray in as a  
holder.  So in your parent/child objects you would write something like:

Node>>parent
	^ parent ifNotNil: [parent first] ifNil: [parent]

Node>>parent: p
	parent := p ifNotNil: [WeakArray with: p] ifNil: [p]

thus using a WeakArray as a holder for the parent.

When a weak reference gets garbage collected, its weak references are  
set to nil first.



On Jul 13, 2008, at 9:15 AM, Rob Rothwell wrote:

> Can someone explain what a "weak" vs (I am guessing) "strong"  
> reference is?  I have been struggling with Garbage Collection for  
> quite some time now and saw this on another list:
>
> "You'll need to add an instance variable to process and modify fork  
> to record the origin.  Currently processes don't remember their  
> ancestor.  I recommend you create a special fork that remembers  
> ancestry, rather than modifying the default fork.  You will  
> potentially accumulate a lot of garbage otherwise.  Also, you might  
> consider making the reference from a process to its parent weak to  
> allow the parent to be GC'ed when it terminates even if it has  
> children."
>
> I, too, am maintaining parent/child relationships in my application  
> and have just been doing something like:
>
> Parent>>createChild
>      |child|
>      child := Child new parent: self.
>      ^child
>
> I am assuming, given my troubles, that this is NOT a weak reference?!
>
> Thank you,
>
> Rob
>
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