[Python-Dev] Quick-and-dirty weak references

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Tim Peters wrote:
> 
> [M.-A. Lemburg]
> > Have you checked the weak reference dictionary implementation
> > by Dieter Maurer ? It's at:
> >
> >       http://www.handshake.de/~dieter/weakdict.html
> 
> A project where I work is using it; it blows up a lot <wink/frown>.
> 
> While some form of weak dict is what most people want in the end, I'm not
> sure Dieter's decision to support weak dicts with only weak values (not weak
> keys) is sufficient.  For example, the aforementioned project wants to
> associate various computed long strings with certain hashable objects, and
> for some reason or other (ain't my project ...) these objects can't be
> changed.  So they can't store the strings in the objects.  So they'd like to
> map the objects to the strings via assorted dicts.  But using the object as
> a dict key keeps it (and, via the dicts, also its associated strings)
> artificially alive; they really want a weakdict with weak *keys*.
> 
> I'm not sure I know of a clear & fast way to implement a weakdict building
> only on the weak() function.  Jack?
> 
> Using weak objects as values (or keys) with an ordinary dict can prevent
> their referents from being kept artificially alive, but that doesn't get the
> dict itself cleaned up by magic.  Perhaps "the system" should notify a weak
> object when its referent goes away; that would at least give the WO a chance
> to purge itself from structures it knows it's in ...

Perhaps one could fiddle something out of the Proxy objects
in mxProxy (you know where...). These support a special __cleanup__
protocol that I use a lot to work around circular garbage:
the __cleanup__ method of the referenced object is called prior
to destroying the proxy; even if the reference count on the
object has not yet gone down to 0.

This makes direct circles possible without problems: the parent
can reference a child through the proxy and the child can reference the
parent directly. As soon as the parent is cleaned up, the reference to
the proxy is deleted which then automagically makes the
back reference in the child disappear, allowing the parent
to be deallocated after cleanup without leaving a circular
reference around.

> > ...
> > BTW, how would this be done in JPython ? I guess it doesn't
> > make much sense there because cycles are no problem for the
> > Java VM GC.
> 
> Weak refs have many uses beyond avoiding cycles, and Java 1.2 has all of
> "hard", "soft", "weak", and "phantom" references.  See java.lang.ref for
> details.  I stopped paying attention to Java, so it's up to you to tell us
> what you learn about it <wink>.

Thanks for the reference... but I guess this will remain a
weak one for some time since the latter is currently a
limited resource :-)

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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