Why are weak pointers useful?

Question

I've been reading up on garbage collection looking for features to include in my programming language and I came across "weak pointers". From here:

Weak pointers are like pointers, except that references from weak pointers do not prevent garbage collection, and weak pointers must have their validity checked before they are used.

Weak pointers interact with the garbage collector because the memory to which they refer may in fact still be valid, but containing a different object than it did when the weak pointer was created. Thus, whenever a garbage collector recycles memory, it must check to see if there are any weak pointers referring to it, and mark them as invalid (this need not be implemented in such a naive way).

I've never heard of weak pointers before. I would like to support many features in my language, but in this case I cannot for the life of me think of a case where this would be useful. For what would one use weak pointer?

Answer 1

A really big one is caching. Let's think through how a cache would work:

The idea behind a cache is to store objects in memory until memory pressure becomes so great that some of the objects need to be pushed out (or are explicitly invalidated of course). So your cache repository object must hold on to these objects somehow. By holding onto them via weak reference, when the garbage collector goes looking for things to consume because memory is low, the items referred to only by weak reference will appear as candidates for garbage collection. Items in the cache that are currently being used by other code will have hard references still active, so those items will be protected from garbage collection.

In most situations you won't be rolling your own caching mechanism, but it is common to use a cache. Let's suppose you want to have a property which refers to an object in cache, and that property stays in scope for a long time. You would prefer to fetch the object from cache, but if it's not available, you can get it from persisted storage. You also don't want to force that particular object to stay in memory if pressure gets too high. So you can use a weak reference to that object, which will allow you to fetch it if it is available but also allow it to fall out of cache.

Answer 2

A typical use case is storage of additional object attributes. Suppose you have a class with a fixed set of members, and, from the outside, you want to add more members. So you create a dictionary object -> attributes, where the keys are weak references. Then, the dictionary doesn't prevent the keys from being garbage collected; removal of the object should also trigger removal of the values in the WeakKeyDictionary (e.g. by means of a callback).