Question

After reading this description: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:weak_maps

I’m trying to get a hang of it, but I do not get the overall picture. What is it all about? It seems to be supported in Firefox 6: http://kangax.github.com/es5-compat-table/non-standard/

Answer 1

WeakMap

WeakMaps basically allow you to have a HashTable with a key that isn’t a String.

So you can set the key to be, i.e. [1] and then can say Map.get([1])

Example from the MDN:

var wm1 = new WeakMap(),
    wm2 = new WeakMap();
var o1 = {},
    o2 = function(){},
    o3 = window;

wm1.set(o1, 37);
wm1.set(o2, "azerty");
wm2.set(o1, o2); // a value can be anything, including an object or a function
wm2.set(o3, undefined);
wm2.set(wm1, wm2); // keys and values can be any objects. Even WeakMaps!

wm1.get(o2); // "azerty"
wm2.get(o2); // undefined, because there is no value for o2 on wm2
wm2.get(o3); // undefined, because that is the set value

wm1.has(o2); // true
wm2.has(o2); // false
wm2.has(o3); // true (even if the value itself is 'undefined')

wm1.has(o1);   // true
wm1.delete(o1);
wm1.has(o1);   // false

The reason for its existance is:

in order to fix a memory leak present in many uses of weak-key tables.

Apparently emulating weakmaps causes memory leaks. I don’t know the details of those memory leaks.