Posted by Igor Stasenko on Feb 14, 2011; 9:33pm
URL: https://forum.world.st/Working-with-weak-announcements-tp3305802p3305918.html

On 14 February 2011 21:52, Esteban Lorenzano <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm working with weak announcements, trying to make it work, and I have a problem in #on:do: protocol (or #when:do:)
> I try to explain:
>
> This method receives a block, not an object/selector, so I can't create a WeakMessageSend which is the appropriate message to handle in other cases.
> Well, the real question is... how can I produce a "Weak BlockClosure reference" who can die if receiver dies?
> I tried some hacks (really ugly hacks, btw), but fail completely.
> Any idea?
>

Don't even try doing it until we will have ephemerons support at VM side :)

I explained this few days ago to Stephane, and also i mentioned about
this maybe half of year ago when i took a look at announcements.

With ephemerons you can have:
- reference a block strongly only if subscriber , which held weakly is alive.

Once subscribed dies, you start referencing block weakly.

In terms on GC it means, that during mark phase, you are visiting a
references which reachable through block closure only if your
subscriber are already marked as 'live'.

So, this means that you can do weak subscriptions like following:


self weakOn: Foo do: [:announcement | self bar ].

A 'self' is a subscriber. But if you create a subscription from a pair of:
 <subscriber> and <block>
without using ephemerons you should make sure that reference to
subscriber are not reachable through given block.
Otherwise, a weak reference become strong one, because you referencing
a block strongly and therefore subscriber too,
since block referencing subscriber through one of its vars.

So, without ephemerons you have to invent some workarounds by
rewriting above code with something like:


self weakOn: Foo do: [:announcement :myself |
    myself bar
 ].

in the above, a block no longer referencing receiver (a subsriber),
and instead it will be passed as extra argument
to the block.

( except that still, you will have a problem, if closure keeps a
reference to home context, which in own turn referencing subscriber
through context's receiver.. so without emphemerons you should be
really careful)

And of course, i think that the usefulness of Announcements is quite
limited without proper weak subscription support,
because weak subscriptions makes things a lot more easier: you don't
have to explicitly unsubscribe some object, once you no longer using
it ,
which as to me means that about 99% of all subscriptions in system
will be weak ones , simply to prevent potential problems with hanging
references, and because you don't have to worry about unsubscribing.

And of course, without weak-block subscriptions, the ease of use of
subscription mechanism is a bit limited.
So, instead of writing simple and cool:

self weakOn: Foo do: [:announcement | self bar ].


you must do more elaborate (and IMO less elegant)

self weakOn: Foo send: #handleFooAnnouncement: .

and then in #handleFooAnnouncement: you making 'self bar'

P.S. the #weakOn: ... is not part of Announcements protocol , it is
just an example of 'meta-message' to reveal an intent to create a weak
subscription to some announcer by using receiver as a subscriber.


> best,
> Esteban
>



--
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.