bettrlife/weak-collections

Collections of transparent weak references (for caching, etc.).

dev-master 2015-11-12 18:06 UTC

Requires

• ext-weakref: *

Requires (Dev)

• phpunit/phpunit: *

BSD-3-Clause

README

class WeakArray

Implements an array of where the values are always a weak reference in the array. In other words, this is an array you can stick things in without forcing those objects to stay alive. If the object becomes invalid, so too does the key.

Useful for things like keeping a cache of database objects, so if two things ask for the same ID, you can give them the same underlying object without causing the object to stay in memory unnecessarily.

Contrast this with WeakMap, which attaches arbitrary data to a weakly-referenced key.

Bonus

The optional-weakref branch provides compatibility shims for WeakRef and WeakMap, so you can develop against the weakref PECL extension without installing it everywhere (with the hopefully-obvious caveat that without the weakref extension, all references are strong).