> I would like to use weak pointers in my code, and I wrote a little test
> to check its behavior... It does not work. Why? Maybe I did not
> understand them...
[...] 
> let w = Weak.create 1;;
> let r = ref "hello";;
> 
> Weak.set w 0 (Some !r);;
> print_weak w 0;;
> 
> Gc.full_major ();;
> print_weak w 0;;
> 
> r := "world";;
> print_weak w 0;;
[...] 

> Some ...
> Some ...
> 
>   I do not understand why the very last print is "Some ..." and not "None".

The problem here is that you use constant string data: these citations
are global references that are never garbage collected, since there
really exists a pointer to them from the global symbol table.

Use strings allocated by make_string (== String.create) instead: you
should observe what you expected to observe.

However, weak pointers are far from being simple to use: you should be
aware of fine grain details about the compiler and the memory manager

Pierre Weis

INRIA, Projet Cristal, Pierre.Weis@inria.fr, http://pauillac.inria.fr/~weis/