[cairo] reference counting vs garbage collection

Keith Packard keithp at keithp.com
Wed Jan 5 10:53:56 PST 2005


Around 11 o'clock on Jan 5, Owen Taylor wrote:

> I think making destroy unref in this manner is a serious mistake, because
> it makes things *very* hard for language bindings; for a language binding,
> reference counting (keeping memory alive) must be independent from method
> called by the application.

The language binding is free to separate these two activities by simply 
calling _ref before _destroy.  Again, the goal is to preserve the symmetry 
for manually allocated memory environments, which is broken if it must:

	_create 
	...
	_destroy
	_unref

-keith


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