weakrefs

[William Trenker]

I'm trying to get a better grasp on the difference between weakref.ref and weakref.proxy.

I've read PEP 205 and goolged for additional description information on weakrefs, but I'm not finding much. The docs for the weakref module includes the line "XXX -- need to say more here!".

Can anyone point me to tutorials or examples that illustrate where and why one would use a proxy instead of a ref?

Thanks,
Bill

 

[Martin v. =?iso-8859-15?q?L=F6wis?=]

Can anyone point me to tutorials or examples that illustrate where
and why one would use a proxy instead of a ref?

It's very easy: If you want the weakref to be used transparently in
place of the original object, you use a proxy - it tries to emulate,
by delegation, all attributes to the underlying objects. If you can
accept an explicit dereference operation throughout, you use a ref.

Regards,
Martin