When to use weak references in .Net?
I have not personally come across a situation where I’ve needed to use WeakReference type in .Net, but the popular belief seems to be that it should be used in caches. Dr Jon Harrop gave a very good case against the use of WeakReferences in caches in his answer to this question.
What use is a non-zeroing weak reference?
When reading about the various options for working with things like ARC / GC, I often come across explicit wording about which weak references are zeroing (ie, your reference becomes nil/null/0 when the object is collected) and which non-zeroing (you get a dangling pointer). This leads me to ask: What possible use could there be for a non-zeroing weak pointer? You can’t use it for anything if you’re not sure whether it’s any good, can you? And how would you check its validity without risking a core dump / segfault?
What use is a non-zeroing weak reference?
When reading about the various options for working with things like ARC / GC, I often come across explicit wording about which weak references are zeroing (ie, your reference becomes nil/null/0 when the object is collected) and which non-zeroing (you get a dangling pointer). This leads me to ask: What possible use could there be for a non-zeroing weak pointer? You can’t use it for anything if you’re not sure whether it’s any good, can you? And how would you check its validity without risking a core dump / segfault?