It's a Listener's Life

It was my understanding (base on Moock's Essential AS 3.0) that weak references are all about avoiding unreferenced listeners from becoming stranded in some object's listener list without any means to remove them. That it is all about the garbage collection of the listener, rather than the object it was registered with. But of course, as long as the listener lives, there is going to be a reference to its object, and so it too cannot be gc'd.

Thanks for the input though

"no", I am assuming, answers: "This is the whole point of weak references, is it not?..."

Would you care to explain yourself? I'd like to better my understanding; this is the whole point of this communication, is it not?...

hmmm... I don't have much programming experience, but thinking about it logically, it appears to me that this test is flawed for two reasons:

1. If you annul the object with which the listener was registered, it matters not whether the reference to it is weak or strong. In both cases there will be no (countable) references left to the listener (it would be in no object's 'listener list') and thus it should be eligible for garbage collection. The true test is whether the listener will be gc'd without annulling the object. This is the whole point of weak references, is it not?...

2. Once the listening object is annulled, how do you remove the listener? How do you reference it?

I ran a test with a Timer listener for the functionality of weak references. It turns out that whether or not the listening object still exists, and whether or not the reference to the listener is weak or strong, the listener does not get garbage collected. Of course, one could argue that the test program simply did not consume a sufficient amount of memory to trigger the garbage collector, but trying to do that (with a loop, say, that feeds an array with a thousand Text Fields per second), will sooner crash the program than exhibit any evidence of the garbage collection of the listener!

At this point I just cannot think of a way to reliably test the functionality of a weak reference in AS. And so I am simply going to have to ignore the useWeakReference feature, remove listeners manually and hope that the garbage collector knows what it's doing. Pity...

And so, in this particular case, I am assuming that it would be correct to remove the listener by using 'event.target.removeEventListener(...)', as no other reference to the original object with which the listener was registered exists. event.target=null doesn't work.

Thanks kglad