Programming in Lua : 17.2

This first edition was written for Lua 5.0. While still largely relevant for later versions, there are some differences.
The fourth edition targets Lua 5.3 and is available at Amazon and other bookstores.
By buying the book, you also help to support the Lua project.

Programming in Lua

Part II. Tables and Objects Chapter 17. Weak Tables

17.2 – Object Attributes

Another important use of weak tables is to associate attributes with objects. There are endless situations where we need to attach some attribute to an object: names to functions, default values to tables, sizes to arrays, and so on.

When the object is a table, we can store the attribute in the table itself, with an appropriate unique key. As we saw before, a simple and error-proof way to create a unique key is to create a new object (typically a table) and use it as key. However, if the object is not a table, it cannot keep its own attributes. Even for tables, sometimes we may not want to store the attribute in the original object. For instance, we may want to keep the attribute private, or we do not want the attribute to disturb a table traversal. In all these cases, we need an alternative way to associate attributes to objects. Of course, an external table provides an ideal way to associate attributes to objects (it is not by chance that tables are sometimes called associative arrays). We use the objects as keys, and their attributes as values. An external table can keep attributes of any type of object (as Lua allows us to use any type of object as a key). Moreover, attributes kept in an external table do not interfere with other objects and can be as private as the table itself.

However, this seemingly perfect solution has a huge drawback: Once we use an object as a key in a table, we lock the object into existence. Lua cannot collect an object that is being used as a key. If we use a regular table to associate functions to its names, none of those functions will ever be collected. As you might expect, we can avoid this drawback by using a weak table. This time, however, we need weak keys. The use of weak keys does not prevent any key from being collected, once there are no other references to it. On the other hand, the table cannot have weak values; otherwise, attributes of live objects could be collected.

Lua itself uses this technique to keep the size of tables used as arrays. As we will see later, the table library offers a function to set the size of an array and another to get this size. When you set the size of an array, Lua stores this size in a private weak table, where the index is the array itself and the value is its size.