Re: RFC WeakRefs

On 18 May 2018 13:15:21 BST, Etienne Kneuss <colder@php.net> wrote: >On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 1:59 PM Rowan Collins <rowan.collins@gmail.com> >wrote: > >> On 17 May 2018 10:35:11 BST, Etienne Kneuss <colder@php.net> wrote: >> >That said, if the plan is to subsume pecl-weakref, I suggest we also >> >reimplement weakmaps, which offer a convenient way of storing >> >meta/cache >> >data and is not implementable in userland without trade-offs. >> >> It looks to me like WeakMap would be fairly trivial to implement in >> userland as a combination of WeakRef, ArrayAccess, Iterable, and an >> internal SplObjectStorage for the ability to use objects as keys >(although >> I'm not clear why it uses object keys in the first place). >> > >In weakmaps it is the keys that are weak, hence objects only; the >values >are arbitrary data associated with them. >The goal is to provide a way to associate metadata that may also be >collected in case the key gets collected. >In some sense it would behave as if this metadata was stored as a >property >of the object, only it is stored externally in a weakmap. Ah, that makes more sense; there didn't seem to be any accrual description in the manual of what they were for; maybe I was looking in the wrong place. In that case, I understand your request to include it, and apologise for the noise :) Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]