Do you use ReleasableReferences?

Almost 2 years ago, we added the dagger.releasablereferences package (@CanReleaseReferences, ReleasableReferenceManager, etc) to give users a mechanism to have regular scoping considerations (only use this one instance anywhere in my component) but also allow for the objects to be garbage collected under memory pressure if they weren’t being referred to.

As far as we can tell (from internal code searches, public github projects, github issues, and ASG) there doesn’t appear to be much, if any, usage of the feature, so we’re considering getting rid of it to burn down some technical complexity.

Before we do so, we wanted to see - is anyone planning on beginning to use the feature, or perhaps didn’t know about the feature but upon reading this message thinks it could be useful? If so, please reach out to us to discuss.

If we don’t hear of anyone, we’ll plan on removing the feature sometime soon. Given that it is marked @Beta we can remove it, but we’d like to understand any usages that exist to see if the feature was ever used appropriately.

[TWiStErRob]

Downvoted to signify not using, never heard about it. (@ronshapiro maybe clarify which reaction to use for what response)

[bmeike]

I find this annotation useful. It is, in fact, what I thought @Reuseable did. I only found this when I got evidence that @Reuseable was not doing what I expected (it creates un-GCable singletons). While I take @TWiStErRob point, Dagger is the factory from which I get my instances. It seems at least plausible, to me, to keep this control in that factory.