Create a weak reference to an object

Question

Is it possible in Actionscript 3 to create a weak reference to an object, so that it can be garbage collected.

I'm creating some classes to make debugging easier, so I don't want the objects to hang around in memory if they are only referenced here (and of course I don't want to fill the code with callbacks to remove the objects)

Answer 1

Right now I've made a simple class to take advantage of the Dictionary weakKeys parameter:

public class WeakReference
{
 private var dic

 public function WeakReference(object)
 {
  this.dic = new Dictionary(true)
  this.dic[object] = true
 }

 public function get Value()
 {
  for (var object in this.dic)
  {
   return object
  }
  return null
 }
}

Answer 2

Grant Skinner has written an excellent series of articles on resource management in ActionScript 3, and in the third part of that series he introduces the WeakReference and the WeakProxyReference helper classes that can be used for this.

Answer 3

@matt lohkamp's comment - reason he missed the semi-colons is that the code was probably written in the Flash IDE which isn't strict about missing ;s.