Does WeakReference make a good cache?

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Using WeakReferences as the primary means of referencing cached objects is not really a great idea, because as Josh said, your at the mercy of any future behavioral changes to WeakReference and the GC.

However, if your cache needs any kind of resurrection capability, use of WeakReferences for items that are pending purge is useful. When an item meets eviction criteria, rather than immediately evicting it, you change its reference to a weak reference. If anything requests it before it is GC’ed, you restore its strong reference, and the object can live again. I have found this useful for some caches that have hard to predict hit rate patterns with frequent enough “resurrections” to be beneficial.

If you have predictable hit rate patterns, then I would forgoe the WeakReference option and perform explicit evictions.

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