Is it possible to create a “weak reference” in JavaScript?

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Update: Since July, 2020 some implementations (Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Node.js) has had support for WeakRefs as defined in the WeakRefs proposal, which is a “Stage 3 Draft” as of December 16, 2020.

There is no language support for weakrefs in JavaScript. You can roll your own using manual reference counting, but not especially smoothly. You can’t make a proxy wrapper object, because in JavaScript objects never know when they’re about to be garbage-collected.

So your ‘weak reference’ becomes a key (eg. integer) in a simple lookup, with an add-reference and remove-reference method, and when there are no manually-tracked references anymore then entry can be deleted, leaving future lookups on that key to return null.

This is not really a weakref, but it can solve some of the same problems. It’s typically done in complex web applications to prevent memory leakage from browsers (typically IE, especially older versions) when there is a reference loop between a DOM Node or event handler, and an object associated with it such as a closure. In these cases a full reference-counting scheme may not even be necessary.

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