Alex Tkachman schrieb:

never had a look at GoogleCollection, so I can't know ;) But if you are going to abstract the fact that you use different kinds of references, then I guess you end up with a solution similar to this.

if you inherit directly from SoftReference and others, then you loose the ability to abstract the reference type. As a result you had for example a weak and a soft map which did exactly the some, only one was using WeakReferences, while the other one was using SoftReferences. And about less memory... what do you think the current structure requires more in memory? before we had a subclass of the reference, now we have a subclass of ManagedReference, which holds the reference. The is-a has become a has-a, but has-a is hidden away. I don't think that this will require huge amounts of additional memory, just two more pointers.

Ah, I may understand now what you think... Ok, let me explain again...

I made an internal clas which subclasses the reference class and this class has the a point to the handler, where the handler is the information we want to carry with the references... like for example hash map entires. ManagedReferece has no a pointer to such a reference subclass and "this" is used for the handler object in the reference subclass... meaning the ManagedReference instance is the handler. When you now write code, you use and extend the ManagedRefernce class. There is no level of indirection invovled in this. The only place where the handler is actually used is after garbage collection, when you query the ReferenceQueue and finalize the handler. Only there. I very much doubt, that this has a major impact on performance, especially if that part of the code is never even called, like when the idling manager is used. For things like the map entry the oly difference is that you now do not directly call the get() method of the reference, but the get() method of the ManagedReference, which then calls the get() method of the reference. So there is one additional method call in between here. That may have a small impact, but how much can be said only after doing some performance measurements

bye blackdrag