One big problem is that the special method that's suppsoed to be called when something is freed is not called when it is freed, and may never be called. This kind of makes it impossible to say, remove sprites from the rendering pipeline when they are no longer needed. Of course, it also is impossible to do that because there are no weak references which don't contribute to the reference count, meaning because the sprites are in a rendering list in the first place they never would run out of pointers to them to begin with.
Oh and the whole freeing stuff when it goes otu of reference? I've been using BlitzMax for a year now and I'd say I'm fairly expert at it at this point, and I still find it really hard to keep track of what I still have pointers to. As elegant as this method is, the inelegant method is by far less confusing, and having the two mixed has been a recipe for disaster in my code on more than one occasion.
I say explicitly requiring things to be freed is the way to go. Then you don't even need weak references to just confuse matters more.
Oh and the whole freeing stuff when it goes otu of reference? I've been using BlitzMax for a year now and I'd say I'm fairly expert at it at this point, and I still find it really hard to keep track of what I still have pointers to. As elegant as this method is, the inelegant method is by far less confusing, and having the two mixed has been a recipe for disaster in my code on more than one occasion.
I say explicitly requiring things to be freed is the way to go. Then you don't even need weak references to just confuse matters more.