Re: weak references

I too would welcome a solution to this problem, I've run into it several times already and always had to use a semi-satisfactory solution. I hadn't heard about weak-references before, and I generally like the concept. What I am not so sure is wether this makes everything alot more complicated for users who do not know/care about the problem or the solution. Of course the impact on those users depends on the actual solution. I came at the problem from a different angle and came to a different solution: If I could get the refcount on a certain object, and kept the object stored centrally in one list, I'd know that if the refcount is down to 1 (or some other constant) that the object ist not in use anymore. I believe that this would be quite a simple PHP addition...a simple function called: get_ref_count() or something and as I remember, that value is always stored in the zval... The only other thing that would help would be a callback (or callable) which is triggered by PHP reaching a certain memory-limit, absolute or relative. Then I could clean up memory according to my own business-logic... This way, PHP would not feature something totally new, but one could still solve the problem with some work. Do I make any sense at all? Am I missing the point? Anyway, this is an interesting problem. Cheers. Lars