No way to serialize Weak pointers

[erickt]

As mentioned on reddit. Open question: What do we do if the value the Weak pointer is pointing at has been destroyed? Should we serialize them as an Option pointer?

[erickt]

It's also not clear what we should do for deserialization.

[oli-obk]

I'd serialize it as an Option pointer and during deserialization, in case it's None, just create an Rc, make a Weak from that and drop the Rc.

[erickt]

@oli-obk: I suppose that would work, but it seems sad that we wouldn't actually be able to deserialize these weak types. I wonder if a better idea would be to get a impl Default implemented for Weak types, that defaults to it not being defined.

[shahn]

I think it doesn't really make sense to put more time into this until #194 is resolved somehow. For Weak pointers the failure modes mentioned in #194 are even worse.

Nevertheless, getting a default impl for Weak into rust seems smart.

[apasel422]

rust-lang/rust#30467 added a Weak::new method, though it is unstable.

[oli-obk]

Weak::new is now (1.10) stable: rust-lang/rust#30425 (comment)

[shahn]

My point about #194 being unresolved remains I'm afraid, tho of course I'm happy Weak::new is stable now