From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2007-12-21T22:50:28+09:00
Subject: Re: First stab at a weakref test suite

Eric Hodel wrote:
> On Dec 20, 2007, at 21:45 PM, Daniel Berger wrote:
>> I follow the same pattern in the tests, but it doesn't raise the 
>> expected error. Any ideas?
> 
> Since the GC is conservative, references may exist longer than you 
> expect because the item that should be collected is still referenced 
> from the stack.  I don't know of an easy way around this.

This is probably the largest reason why a weakref suite will be a little 
tricky. My best recommendation would be to loop calling GC.start until 
the reference gets collected; perhaps with an upper count... "if we 
reach 1000 iterations and it's not collected, it isn't working".

- Charlie