- From: Miles Sabin <msabin@cromwellmedia.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 20 Oct 1998 18:21:41 +0100
- To: "'Ray Whitmer'" <ray@imall.com>, "'DOM list'" <www-dom@w3.org>
Ray Whitmer wrote, > I must have missed something here. Even with unpredictable > Java GC, we are still much better off with weak references > than without. I would interpret this as greatly helping > address the problem. I guess a lot turns on what you count as 'much better off'. As far as I can see all you gain is not having to implement the handle-body pattern ... but I think for anyone able to implement the DOM reasonably well that ought to be a trivial exercise. As it happens, handle-body+finalize is the guts of the underlying implementation of weak refs in 1.2 as a peek at the JDK sources will reveal. The issue about GC unpredicatability is a real one. Suppose we're doing stuff on the server-side and have a long lived DOM, which is manipulated via NodeLists many times over an extended period. Un-GCed NodeLists will accumulate over time; as they do performance will tail off until they're reclaimed and finalized (with handle-body), or weak refs do their thing (in Java 1.2). OK, that's speculation ... I'd be interested to see some stats and analysis from someone (Ray?) who's put that sort of implementation together. Cheers, Miles -- Miles Sabin Cromwell Media Internet Systems Architect 5/6 Glenthorne Mews +44 (0)181 410 2230 London, W6 0LJ msabin@cromwellmedia.co.uk England
Received on Tuesday, 20 October 1998 13:26:16 UTC