Ephemeron
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- For other uses, see Ephemera (disambiguation).
In computer science, finalization occurs when a garbage collector (GC) informs an application that an object is "almost collectable." It is used to help an application maintain its invariants. To make finalization more useful, "almost collectable" is defined in terms of a new class of objects, called ephemerons. Ephemerons are similar to weak pairs, but an object in an ephemeron's key field may be classed as "almost collectable" even if it is reachable from the ephemeron's value fields.
[edit] Description
An ephemeron is an object which refers strongly to its contents as long as the ephemeron's key is not garbage collected, and weakly from then on. Ephemerons solve a problem which is commonly found when trying to "attach" properties to objects by using a registry. When some property should be attached to an object, the property should (in terms of GC behavior) typically have the life-time that an instance variable of this object would have. However, this is complicated by having an external association between the object and its property such as:
property --------- registry --------- association --------- object
Here, the registry (a third party) will hold onto the association itself which would require manual removal from the registry (instead of automated garbage collection). While this problem can always be solved in any given concrete situation by using one of the various weak association types, choosing the 'right' kind of association depends on a variety of factors some of which can change dynamically.
Ephemerons solve this problem by defining that the 'contents' (value) of an ephemeron will be held strongly until the key is known to be garbage collected. From then on, the contents of the ephemeron will be held weakly. Therefore, the contents of an ephemeron can become eligible for garbage collection if and only if the key is garbage collectable which is the exact behavior which we would observe for an instance variable of the object.
[edit] History
Ephemerons were first invented by George Bosworth while he worked at Digitalk. They were used as the finalization mechanism in Visual Smalltalk Enterprise. Today ephemerons are available in most Smalltalk dialects as well as many other languages with automatic garbage collection.
[edit] External links
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The word "Ephemeron" itself refers to an object of a transitory or impermanent nature, from the same word root as "Ephermeral". The first use I myself found was in an article by Mary Wollestonecraft in her 1795 treatise on the rights of women; no doubt there are earlier uses of the term. This may be useful to users who were looking for a pre-Digital-Age definition of the term.
