[Rcpp-devel] reference counting, garbage collection, etc ....

[Romain François]

Hi,

Right, so looking at R_PreserveObject and R_ReleaseObject (still waiting 
for some insight from R-devel) it seems that we can preserve and release 
the same SEXP more than once. preserve adds the sexp to the list of 
preserved SEXP (even if it is there already), and release release the 
first one it finds.

This leads me to thinking that we should make the garbage collection 
stuff automatic and hidden, i.e when setting the SEXP of an RObject, we 
automatically preserve it, and we release it automatically when the 
object goes out of scope.

Currently we have to manage this business manually, which will leads to 
problems.

So i propose that RObject::m_sexp becomes private (as opposed to 
protected) and we had a protected setSEXP that :
- release the current SEXP if there is one
- preserve the new SEXP

and make preserve and release protected (maybe even private members of 
RObject), and remove the preserved bool.



-- 
Romain Francois
Professional R Enthusiast
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http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr
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