Comments on: Quiz #1: Find the bug

By: Mike Morearty’s blog » Blog Archive » Solution to quiz #1: inner functions and garbage collection

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 21:48:00 +0000

[...] Mike Morearty’s blog Mostly about the debugger in Adobe Flex Builder. « Quiz #1: Find the bug [...]

By: Ray Greenwell

Ray Greenwell — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 21:27:11 +0000

A function is created and a reference to that function is passed to addActionListener, but the MyClass itself never saves a reference to the function. The last argument to addActionListener tells the event dispatcher to retain only a weak reference to the function. As a result, there are zero strong references to the function and it may be garbage collected at some point in the future. The trace() statement may print never, a few times, or forever- that is undefined and depends on the player's garbage collection, which is outside of our control as SWF developers.

By: Brandon Ellis

Brandon Ellis — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 13:04:20 +0000

I'm thinking that using an inline function instead of a function call (as the eventListener) will make the listener unable to be removed.

By: Michael Klishin

Michael Klishin — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 01:54:30 +0000

Sprite has no timeline, thus this makes no sense because enter frame event is never fired.

By: geecu

geecu — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 01:07:41 +0000

Sprite has no idea what a frame is... since it's a Sprite. So it won't have an "enter frame" event. Am I right or am I right? Right?! Riiiiiight! :)

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 00:17:28 +0000

The last arg--true--tells the event publisher to hold a weak reference to the callback function. So the in-line callback function might get garbage-collected.

Right?