Use cases for WeakMap
Brendan Eich
brendan at mozilla.com
Sun May 15 16:06:59 PDT 2011
On May 15, 2011, at 3:41 PM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote:
> On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 6:31 PM, Allen Wirfs-Brock
> <allen at wirfs-brock.com> wrote:
>>
>> On May 14, 2011, at 5:03 PM, Oliver Hunt wrote:
>>
>>> I suspect i did suggest WeakMap but I think I misunderstood the proposal. I felt the goal was to prevent the key from being kept around forever even when the value was gone, I did not expect the key to keep the value alive.
>>>
>>> --Oliver
>>>
>>
>> I think I've suggest in the past that what we are currently calling "WeakMap" should just be called "ObjectMap" or something like that. I can't think of any use case where object identify is used as a map key and you don't want the "WeakMap" semantics. Essentially "WeakMap" just means "NonLeakyObjectMap".
>
> It's pretty easy to implement a Set datastructure on top of a Map, and
> if your set's equality is ===, then you'd want a strong
> object-identity-keyed map. WeakMap semantics would clearly be wrong
> here.
I talked to Sam because it wasn't totally clear to me what the loss of a WeakMap entry if all clients of that Set implementation lost their keys would break. He replied "enumeration".
That's a good point but it disqualifies WeakMap out of the gate. WeakMaps are not enumerable, again to avoid leaking GC non-determinism.
Therefore I don't think ObjectMap is a better name than WeakMap. But neither is NonEnumerableEphemeronBasedWeakMap ;-).
> Of course, to do this using ES.next WeakMaps would be annoying,
> because *only* objects can be used as keys, but that's not really
> relevant to the strong/weak distinction.
This is a good point too. Not sure we've considered a value -> value map carefully yet.
/be
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