Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!nntp.club.cc.cmu.edu!goldenapple.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!oitnews.harvard.edu!purdue!haven.umd.edu!hecate.umd.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!cyclic.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!howland.erols.net!blackbush.xlink.net!ins.net!heeg.de!uucp
From: Hans-Martin Mosner <hmm@heeg.de>
Subject: Re: instance garbage collection
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Message-ID: <333A32B3.409@heeg.de>
Sender: uucp@heeg.de
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Cc: Todd Lovitt <todd.lovitt@psislidell.com>
Organization: Georg Heeg Objektorientierte Systeme
References: <01bc386f$46fb4950$073fa080@almond>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 08:41:23 GMT
X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.01I [de] (WinNT; I)
Lines: 18

Todd Lovitt wrote:
> 
> I am using VisualWorks 2.5 w/Envy 3.01. How do I remove class instances
> that have all nil values? The garbage collector will not clean these
> instances up. Please email me if you have any suggestions.

Find out which objects reference them. Delete the references.
Then the garbage collector does the rest.
There are 2 basic ways you can use to find references:
1. Use 'anObject allOwners' to get all objects that point
   to the object in question. This includes quite some spurious
   references, so you need some experience to interpret the result.
2. Use my PointerFinder mini-tool which allows you to find a
   reference path from the system roots to your object,
   ignoring all the spurious references.
   You can download it from http://www.heeg.de/~hmm/ftp-goodies/

Hans-Martin
