Re: [low priority] WeakMaps with scalar keys

On Wednesday, 10 July 2024 at 18:34, Rob Landers <rob@bottled.codes> wrote: > Hello internals, > > I know now that some of you are swamped getting ready for 8.4, so I want to be clear that this > will be an 8.5+ thing. I am simply sending it to the list in case anyone wants to discuss it, burn > it with fire, give it a gold star, or ignore until later. > > Currently, a WeakMap may only have object keys, and this logically makes a lot of sense. > However, there are cases where you want to reference an object by a value but if the value is no > longer referenced, no longer need it. A good example of this might be used in dependency injection > containers, lookup tables for value objects, etc. > > I'd like to propose a ReverseWeakMap where the keys must be scalar, and given an object as > the value. Once the value is no longer referenced, the key and value is removed from the > ReverseWeakMap. Isn't this use case already solved with WeakReferences? https://www.php.net/manual/en/class.weakreference.php Best regards, Gina P. Banyard >