On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 4:11 PM Dennis Birkholz <p...@dennis.birkholz.biz> wrote:
> Hi Joe, > > On 02.02.19 09:35, Joe Watkins wrote: > > Some time ago I brought this up for discussion, and last night was > reminded > > of it's existence, and so this morning rebased and reworked the patch a > > little based on the feedback I got back then. > > > > Since it was long ago, and there's no particular rush, I don't intend to > > open voting until the current policy adjustment RFC's are resolved, but > > wanted to give everyone a heads up and ask for any feedback you may have > at > > this time. > > thanks for proposing to bring weak references into core, I myself would > have needed them once or twice. > > One point from the RFC bothers me: > > > The proposed API: > > - does not support serialization > > That is a really unfortunate decision, I would really like to have them > serializable. Otherwise if you want to persist a weak ref you always > have to convert them to a real ref before serialization and back > afterwards. I would really like to have this transparency build in. > Would be great if that could be added. > Serialization for weak refs is a bit tricky, and I feel like supporting it could easily become a foot-gun. The fundamental problem is that for serialization to produce a meaningful value, the object referenced by a WeakReference must also be part of the serialized object graph as a strong reference somewhere. Otherwise, the WeakReference will immediately turn into a dud when unserialization ends, because the object it references is no longer live. I think from a technical perspective, supporting serialization should be possible and not overly hard, it's more a question of whether we want to. As another data point, Java does not support serialization for WeakReference. Nikita
