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Improve reference behavior

Open
#60 3 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
javascript, swift, wasm
Domain
web-dev

Research direction

Begin with Runtime/src/index.ts, especially SwiftRuntimeHeap.release(ref), and reproduce the report using the logging change shown in the issue. Compare the repeated function deallocations with the desired handling of JavaScript language functions; done means an agreed behavior is implemented so those functions are not incorrectly released.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement

I made a small change to report whenever an object ref is deleted:

---
 Runtime/src/index.ts | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

diff --git a/Runtime/src/index.ts b/Runtime/src/index.ts
index 0e641ff..ddfba4e 100644
--- a/Runtime/src/index.ts
+++ b/Runtime/src/index.ts
@@ -93,6 +93,7 @@ class SwiftRuntimeHeap {
     release(ref: ref) {
         const value = this._heapValueById.get(ref);
         const isObject = typeof value == "object"
+        console.log('dereferencing', value);
         if (isObject) {
             const entry = this._heapEntryByValue.get(value)!;
             entry.rc--;

(copy the content of the code block and run pbpaste | git apply in your terminal to make this change)

It reports many deallocations. The thing that caught my attention was the repeated deallocation of functions (like toString and hasOwnProperty). I wonder if there’s a way to recognize functions that are part of the JavaScript language and either dynamically call them when needed or mark them so they don’t get released.

Dominant language
Swift
Stars
986
Forks
76
Avg merge
21h 11m
Merged PRs (30d)
4

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