[mono-android] Tracking GlobalReferences

[Jonathan Pryor]

On Feb 5, 2012, at 11:48 AM, NebulaSleuth wrote:
> As for the "other" leak I mentioned with strings, it seems to be related to changing the "text" property of a TextView. 
> 
> as in:  "TextView.Text = TranslationLookup(TextView.Text);"

The problem isn't the property set. The problem is get_Text(), as it creates an ICharSequence wrapper which holds a gref. (We should probably optimize that...)

As a workaround, you can instead do:

	var text = TextView.TextFormatted;	// contains gref
	TextView.Text = TranslationLookup(text.ToString());
	((IDisposable) text).Dispose();

> But, this seems to allocate a new GRef, and doesn't free up one. These stale
> grefs get freed when I launch a new activity

The problem is that it isn't "stale" -- it's a perfectly valid, referenced, gref. It just happens to be one that you don't care about. :-)

Disposing of it (as shown above) will remove it.

 - Jon