[Newbies] Weakly holding and circular references

[Ben Coman]

On 29 April 2018 at 21:35, Tm Jhnsn <digit at sonic.net> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I've tried to learn how to properly use Weak collections for purposes of
> circular references, but I'm not sure I fully understand -- not enough to
> actually use it in my implementation.
>
> I made a fairly large project a couple of years ago where I ended up with
> a lot of stale information in the image because I had circular references
> keeping objects from being cleared by GC.  I learned my lesson, and
> addressed the situation by building a 'release' mechanism and explicitly
> tearing down objects when I was done with them.
>

Note that since the VM uses a tracing garbage collector rather than
reference counting, circular references *only* between objects 'a' and 'b'
will not in themselves prevent them both being garbage collected.  They
will only stick around if one of them has a chain of references through
from a root object.

cheers -ben
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