[ruby-core:44827] [ruby-trunk - Feature #6309][Assigned] Add a reference queue for weak references

Issue #6309 has been updated by mame (Yusuke Endoh).

Status changed from Feedback to Assigned
Assignee set to matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)

On second thought, the proposal should first get an approval from matz.  Sorry.  Assigning this to him.
Still, it would be helpful to show a concrete use case, I think.

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Yusuke Endoh <[e-mail]>
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Feature #6309: Add a reference queue for weak references
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/6309#change-26402

Author: headius (Charles Nutter)
Status: Assigned
Priority: Normal
Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Category: 
Target version: 


Most interesting uses of WeakRef are much harder to do efficiently without a reference queue.

A reference queue, as implemented by the JVM, is basically a queue into which weak references are placed some time after the object they refer to has been collected. The queue can be polled cheaply to look for collected references.

A simple example of usage can be seen in the weakling gem, with an efficient implementation of an ID hash: https://github.com/headius/weakling/blob/master/lib/weakling/collections.rb

Notice the _cleanup method is called for every operation, to keep the hash clear of dead references. Failure to have a _cleanup method would mean the hash grows without bounds.

_cleanup cannot be implemented efficiently on MRI at present because there's no reference queue implementation. On MRI, _cleanup would have to perform a linear scan of all stored values periodically to search for dead references. For a heavily used hash with many live values, this becomes a very expensive operation.

It's probably possible to implement reference queues efficiently atop the new ObjectSpace::WeakMap internals, since it already keeps track of weak references and can run code when a weak reference no longer refers to a live object.


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http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/