Hi everyone, I have a question. Is Kotlin Reflection a strong reference or a weak reference?

# getting-started

[Tung97 Hl]

Hi everyone, I have a question. Is Kotlin Reflection a strong reference or a weak reference?

[Joffrey]

Kotlin Reflect is a library to inspect the structure of the code at runtime, it's not a reference. What exactly are you referring to from this library?

[Tung97 Hl]

I am thinking about if I retrieve the resource string from ViewModel (I know this is the wrong way but I am just thinking). So if I pass the activity context into the ViewModel, it may lead to a memory leak, right? But if I pass the context::getString instead? Does it still make memory leak happens?

[Joffrey]

Ah. So you're asking whether function references capture their receiver as a weak or strong reference. I am not 100% sure, but I would say it's a strong reference that prevents garbage collection. The function reference would need to become unreachable itself for the context to be eligible for garbage collection.

[ephemient]

a function reference has a tiny bit more magic than a lambda: { Unit } != { Unit } but obj::func == obj::func, { Unit }.name doesn't exist but obj::func.name does
but in all other ways, it behaves like a lambda

[ephemient]

a lambda holds a strong reference to everything it captures

[Tung97 Hl]

Thank you, guys! Very useful to me. 🫡