Recently a colleague of mine noticed this in the MDN description of WeakMap:

Because of references being weak, WeakMap keys are not enumerable (i.e. there is no method giving you a list of the keys). If they were, the list would depend on the state of garbage collection, introducing non-determinism. If you want to have a list of keys, you should use a Map.

My co-worker wondered what this meant exactly? Where does the non-determinism come from? Doesn’t the state of WeakMap still depend on garbage collection even if you can’t enumerate the keys?

To understand this, perhaps it’s best to examine a hypothetical JavaScript where the keys of WeakMap are enumerable. This would let you do some interesting things:

function waitForGc ( obj , callback ) { const map = new WeakMap (); map . set ( obj , 1 ); obj = undefined ; function test () { const keys = Array . from ( map . keys ()); if ( keys . length > 0 ) { setTimeout ( test , 1000 ); } else { callback (); } } }

You could call this function, pass it an object and a callback, and (approximately) when that object was garbage collected, this would call your callback to let you know.

The key insight here is that our hypothetical map.keys() returns something different depending on the state of garbage-collection. If obj has been garbage collected, it returns an empty set, whereas if it has not been, map.keys() will return an iterator with one object in it.

Now, you might be thinking “Can’t I do this anyways? Can’t I just call weakMap.get(obj) to check to see if obj has been garbage collected?” The answer is no; if you had a reference to obj to pass into weakMap.get() , then clearly obj has not been garbage collected, because you have a (strong) reference to it. There’s a WeakMap in JavaScript, but no WeakReference like in Java. So the behavior of weakMap.get() is deterministic, and doesn’t rely on the state of what has or hasn’t been garbage collected (at least, from your viewpoint as the programmer).

Note that being able to detect changes in garbage-collection state might allow some interesting side-channel attacks, which was brought up as one of the reasons not to allow it in the original proposal:

A key property of Weak Maps is the inability to enumerate their keys. This is necessary to prevent attackers observing the internal behavior of other systems in the environment which share weakly-mapped objects. Should the number or names of items in the collection be discoverable from the API, even if the values aren’t, WeakMap instances might create a side channel where one was previously not available.

Java WeakReference, SoftReference, and PhantomReference

There’s a sort of similar and related problem in Java regarding garbage collection of objects referenced by WeakReference s.

In Java, in addition to WeakMap we have a WeakReference - this is like a pointer to an object that “doesn’t count” when the garbage collector is trying to figure out which objects are eligible for garbage collection:

User user = new User ( ' Jason ' ); WeakReference weak = new WeakReference < User >( user ); user = null ; weak . get (); // returns the user, or null if the user has been GCd.

Java also has a SoftReference , which is just like a WeakReference , except the VM will try to keep the object in memory as long as it can, which makes it useful for building caches (especially, if you’re not careful, caches that fill all of memory with useless unused objects). Also, SoftReference has been around since Java 1.2, but even though it was documented as trying to keep objects in memory longer, in Java 1.4 and lower it was implemnted exactly the same as WeakReference . YMMV depending on the VM you are using.

Finally, Java has a PhantomReference , which is just like a WeakReference or a SoftReference , except you’re not allowed to .get() the object that it references. That’s right - it’s like a pointer you’re not allowed to dereference. That sounds totally insane and useless, until you learn about ReferenceQueue s.

ReferenceQueues

When you create a WeakReference , you can optionally add it to a ReferenceQueue by passing such a queue in the constructor. You can then queue.remove() which will block until a reference is ready to be garbage collected, and return that reference to you. (Or, queue.poll() , which returns a reference if one is ready or null if none are, if you don’t want to dedicate a whole thread to watching references.)

This is exactly the mechanism you’d use to implement a WeakMap in Java; every time someone adds an object to your map, you’d create a WeakReference , and then use the WeakReference as a key in a regular Map . But, you need to clean up that key in your Map when the object is ready to be GCed (since otherwise you’d have a Map with a ton of WeakReference keys for GCed objects, and associated values you would never access again, and you’d just slowly eat up all of memory). To do this, you’d add the WeakReference to a ReferenceQueue, and then when the object is about to be GCed, Java would effectively notify you about it and you could remove the WeakReference from your Map.

But, the ReferenceQueue presents a unique problem in Java; When the object is ready to be GCed, the ReferenceQueue is going to pass you back that WeakReference. At that point, you can say “Haha Java! Not today!” and call array.push(weakReference.get()) to create a new strong reference to the object, which makes it no longer eligible for GC.

This sucks for Java. If you create a WeakReference to an object, Java needs to figure out the object is ready for GC, then before it GCs it, it needs to call any reference queues, and then it needs to figure out if the object is ready for GC again. This “two-stage” GC is expensive. But PhantomReference gets around this; because you can’t .get() the object, Java doesn’t need to do the two-stage GC, so it’s cheaper (although of more limited use).

So, at the end of the day, I suppose the JavaScript folks looked at all that mess in Java and said, “Nope, we’re not doing any of that.”

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