Re: Differences beetwen ref and weak ref

[Maciej Piechotka <uzytkownik2 gmail com>]

2006/1/18, Stefan Kost <ensonic hora-obscura de>:
> Hi,
> Uzytkownik wrote:
> > I'm so sorry - when should I use weak reference?
>
> I use waek references in the class collaboration hierarchy. Imagine classes
> GGroup and GItem, where GGroup has GItems. GItem instances need access to
> GGroup, thus they have a GGroup *container element;. When setting the container
> element for an item I use a weak ref to not introduce a circular dependency
> (GGroup references GItem and GItem references GGroup). This works as whenever
> GGroup gets destroyed it will release all GItems.
> So one might ask when I take the weak_ref at all? I something is behaving wrong
> like I unref an GGroup too often, I will access dead memory. When using the
> weak_ref the GGroup pointer will be set to NULL and my assertions will trigger
> when doing checks like G_IS_GROUP(self->container).
>
> Hope that this makes any sense for you :)
>
> Stefan

Yes. Thank you.

Regards