1. Correct. Holding a pointer to the method will need to increase the reference count of the object to guarantee the object is alive when the method is actually called.

2. Yes, the delegate will hold a pointer to both the object and the method.

3. That is the dilemma. For now I will not bother with weak references, so a delegate will initially hold a hard reference to the object. The garbage collector is already capable of resolving circular references that may arise, so this shouldn't be a major problem.

The difficulty with weak references is more a design issue than the actual implementation. The weak references must be generic so the script compiler can build the code for them, but they must also not add a performance penalty where they are not used. I'm toying with several different ideas for this, but so far I'm not ready to start implementing weak references in AngelScript.

Indeed. Thanks for pointing it out.

I've corrected the original text.

Thanks for the contribution. I'll review it carefully when I can and see if it is something I can commit to the svn.

Hi vroad,

It took a while but I've finally reviewed your contribution carefully and I decided to include it with only a few minor adjustments to suit my own style. I've checked in the changes in revision 1666. I still have a few more changes to do, but I'm happy to say that weak references are now supported by AngelScript.

Thanks a lot for the contribution.

Regards,

Andreas