[cl-irc-devel] Circular references, garbage collection & library implementation

[Zach Beane]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2005 at 01:58:44PM +0100, Erik Huelsmann wrote:
> AFAICT, the current implementation will leak memory (ie won't be garbage
> collected correctly) if users and channels are not removed (using
> remove-user and remove-channel) before all references to a connection object
> are lost/broken. In such cases, although nothing refers to the connection
> object anymore, the channel may still contain user objects and the users
> will still hold channel objects in their channel lists. In other words: they
> won't be gc-able.

Without knowing the internals of cl-irc...

If an object isn't reachable, it is garbage collected. Circular
unreachable references are not a problem.

Zach