
Proposal for Ephemerons in Scheme - fogus
http://mumble.net/~campbell/tmp/ephemeron.txt
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madair
Can someone explain the differences between this and weak references in a VM
with garbage collection?

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arohner
To be pedantic, scheme is garbage collected, and several use a VM.

PLT already has weak references, and the author assumes the Scheme
implementation already has them.

As far as I can tell, this is somewhat like a weakHashMap, except each
ephemeron only handles one key value pair.

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copper
PLT already has ephemerons too:

<http://docs.plt-scheme.org/reference/ephemerons.html>

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madair
Thanks! That link says it pretty clear: _In particular, an ephemeron can be
combined with a weak hash table (see Hash Tables) to produce a mapping where
the memory manager can reclaim key–value pairs even when the value refers to
the key._

