[Libreoffice] UNO Object Life Cycle question

[Tomas Hlavaty]

Hi all,

I'm implementing
<http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Uno/Remote/Specifications/Uno_Remote_Protocol#Object_Life_Cycle>
and can't make much sense of it.  It seems to me that the spec is
contradictory:

  ...  unless it considers as bridged in any tuple <o, t'>, where t' is
  a subtype of t (including t itself).  If the same tuple appears
  multiple times in the data of a message, the corresponding reference
  count is incremented multiple times.

  ...

  The optimization rule (to not increment the reference count for <o, t>
  when <o, t> itself or some subtype tuple <o, t'> is considered as
  bridged in) is broken...

The last quoted paragraph:

  to not increment the reference count for <o, t> when <o, t> itself or
  some subtype tuple <o, t'> is considered as bridged in

doesn't sound like reference counting.  If the client fetches XInterface
first, then the reference count can only ever be maximum 1.  It somehow
seems very dependent on what types the client fetches in what order.
Also this rule contradicts the sentense:

  If the same tuple appears multiple times in the data of a message, the
  corresponding reference count is incremented multiple times.

By the exceptional rule, the tuple's refcount should not be incremented.
Is the exceptional rule really meant to say "including t itself"?  Or
does the part "in the data of a message" make the exceptional rule
somehow invalid in the context of one message?

Is this spec still valid?

I implemented the algorithm according to my understanding of the above
spec reducing memory leaks by 1/2 but I still get many leaks.  If I'm
strict and ignore the broken optimization rule, I get LO crashing after
some time, likely because of double release.  I'm still missing
something to get refcounting exactly the way LO does it.

Why is the reference counting algorithm dependent on the casted type in
the first place?  Shouldn't the reference count be interesting only in
connection with oid and not <oid,type>?

UNO is a distributed protocol.  The links should be considered
unreliable.  Is there a mechanism that when a link between the server
and client bridge breaks, the server releases the resources properly, or
do we get/expect memory leaks?

Also, it is not exactly clear at which point in time the release message
should be sent.  One such point in time could be when the client is
finished with the session.  At that point, the client needs to send at
least as many release messages as the number of all the incremented
refcounts it noticed according to this algorithm.  That is potentially
many messages, slowing down the session considerably.  Is there a way to
simply end the session and declare all references not used anymore in
one go/message without causing leaks in the server?

Thank you,

Tomas