Weak reference

In programming, a reference which does not protect its object from garbage collection

In computer programming, a weak reference is a reference that does not protect the referenced object from collection by a garbage collector, unlike a strong reference. An object referenced only by weak references – meaning "every chain of references that reaches the object includes at least one weak reference as a link" – is considered weakly reachable, and can be treated as unreachable and so may be collected at any time. Some garbage-collected languages feature or support various levels of weak references, such as C#, Lua, Java, Lisp, OCaml, Perl, Python and PHP since the version 7.4.

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