I have a silly question. Various questions on SO a...

# android

[dragas]

I have a silly question.
Various questions on SO and tutorials on the web suggest saving a listener interface in your AsyncTask to still keep a reference and publish progress to your fragment/activity/service/anything. Question stands, shouldn't it be WeakReference? I'd assume that ART does not garbage collect running threads and if your application is suddenly ended, keeping a hard reference to your context will prevent ART from garbage collecting it.

[miha-x64]

dragas: if your application have suddenly ended, ART VM will be just killed with whole its heap.
But if your UI is being killed due to screen rotation, you will get short-time memory leak, so yes, reference should be weak, and AsynkTask — static (if nested).
Also, AsynkTasks are unaware of UI lifecycle, so it may be better to use Loaders or MVP.

[kirillrakhman]

or just don't use AsyncTask as there are much better alternatives

[abdellah]

Nobody use AsyncTask those days because their limitations/problems

[miha-x64]

@abdellah wrong, I use `AsyncTaskLoader`s! 🧌

[abdellah]

nice to meet you 🆘

[dragas]

@kirillrakhman I'd assume a better solution would be using Anko's doAsync?

[kirillrakhman]

doAsync is just a wrapper around AsyncTask and only mitigates the problem with leaks by keeping weak references. Using RxJava in combination with, say RxLifecycle will give you a clearer code structure and better leak protection