That's actually the feature I need...

On Sat, Sep 5, 2015, 09:48 Thomas <thomasjamesfoster at bigpond.com> wrote:

> I haven't had too much of a look at the weak references chatter, but the
> npm module you linked to provides a callback for when the object is garbage
> collected. Are you using that feature? Perhaps destructors might be worth
> thinking about as well alongside weak references (then again, maybe this
> putting too much of the underlying gc implementation into the spec).
>
> Thomas
>
> On 5 Sep 2015, at 9:07 PM, Isiah Meadows <isiahmeadows at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm resurrecting this [1] because I have found a use case where I needed a
> weak reference. Is there any chance this could get into the language?
>
> Here's my particular use case: making a stream with a rotating destination
> that itself acts as a stream (snippet of that code, or what I'd like it to
> be).
>
> ```js
> function rotateStream(interval, format) {
>     // Without the weak reference here, there's a memory leak
>     const ref = new WeakReference({})
>     setStream(ref.get(), format)
>     setInterval(function () {
>         if (ref.exists()) setStream(ref.get(), format)
>         else clearInterval(this)
>     }, interval)
>     return ref.get()
> }
> ```
>
> This basically rotates an active stream, with the weak reference pointing
> to the said stream. The alternative requires explicit marking (in this
> case, with a `close` method):
>
> ```js
> function leakyRotateStream(interval, format) {
>     let stream = {close() {
>         clearInterval(timer)
>         timer = stream = null
>     }}
>     const timer = setInterval(function () {
>         setStream(stream, format)
>     }, interval)
>     setStream(stream, format)
>     return stream
> }
> ```
>
> In this use case, weak references would simplify the implementation and
> reduce memory costs. And I would rather take advantage of the GC machinery
> than explicit memory management (as explicit as C), as it would be easier
> to collect when that's the only thing referenced.
>
> (The setInterval callback is gc'd with all its references when it's
> cleared from within.)
>
> Thankfully, I'm using Node.js, so `weak` [2] is an option (the only
> option, really). But I would definitely appreciate if it was available in
> JS proper, across engines. V8, SpiderMonkey, and JSC all have weak
> references to JS objects as part of their public API, and I would be
> surprised if the implementation work would be anything significant.
>
> [1]: https://esdiscuss.org/topic/what-is-the-status-of-weak-references
> [2]: https://github.com/TooTallNate/node-weak
>
> --
> Isiah Meadows
>
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> es-discuss mailing list
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> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
>
>
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On Sat, Sep 5, 2015, 09:48 Thomas <thomasjamesfoster at bigpond.com> wrote:

> I haven't had too much of a look at the weak references chatter, but the
> npm module you linked to provides a callback for when the object is garbage
> collected. Are you using that feature? Perhaps destructors might be worth
> thinking about as well alongside weak references (then again, maybe this
> putting too much of the underlying gc implementation into the spec).

That's actually the feature I need...