Good explanation Ferenc. Yeah I think there's a lot of misunderstandings going on with weak/soft references and how the garbage collector works. Weak/soft references is not some kind of solution to the cyclic reference problem. The GC takes care of that already. You can use whatever OOP patterns with whatever reference graphs you like Lars, the GC will free the entire structure as soon as the cyclic collector runs after you are not referencing it anymore. You might have become a bit confused with my last post where I explained how one could theoretically hack together a soft reference implementation by using weak references and some properties of cyclic collection. Also property access performance is off-topic.
- Weak references solves the loose coupled object indexing problem. "I need this reference as long as it's referenced somewhere else." - Soft references solves the caching problem. "I need this reference as long as we have plenty of memory available." - The GC solves the cyclic reference problem (since 5.3). ~Hannes
