SS: An extension implementing references with garbage collection for the Tcl programming Language.
Version 0.1 is available for testing by Tcl hackers at
http://www.hping.org/tclsbignum/tclref-0.1.tar.gz
The following is the README file included with the 0.1 distribution.
This is a TclRef snapshoot intented for Tcl hackers.
It's basically a translation in C (with some fix and minor changes
in the design) of the ideas at http://wiki.tcl.tk/9549
The main design idea is that in Tcl references should not be
implicit (like pointers), but containers able to hold objects,
that are automatically reclaimed when they are no longer referenced.
The low-level API contains the following commands
[ref someValue]
Returns a reference that holds someValue
[getbyref refValue]
Returns the value contained in the reference refValue
[setref refValue newValue]
Set the reference contained object to newValue
[isref refValue]
Returns a boolean value. True if refValue is a valid existing
reference, false otherwise.
[collect]
Force a GC run.
[emtpyref refValue]
Set the object contained in the refValue reference to the empty
string and returns the previously contained object.
[setfinalizer refValue commandName]
Set the unary command commandName as a command that will be
called just before the refValue reference is to be collected.
commandName is called with the reference value as only argument.
The extension also implements C-like structures that works with references,
just to provide an abstraction layer and an usage example. This structures
allows to create user-defined data structures in Tcl, but actually
the API is not stable. Probably they will be replaced with something of
more similar to http://wiki.tcl.tk/11085 (Alists for Tcl), but revisited
to use references instead of values.
You can find usage examples in the following two files:
- refex.tcl (Data structures examples)
- lambda.tcl (Example of anonymous functions with GC using TclRef)
Salvatore Sanfilippo.
See also:
Category Data Structure 
