do you ever separate the structure of a collection from the values held within to allow queries about the structure to be deferred arbitrarily without keeping the values alive through that reference, or is my project just terminally fucked?

I don't think this one applies to GC'd languages, but I'm pretty sure it applies to C-likes.

Cool that you keep working on orchid. It deserves it.

have you heard of our Lord and Savior Trie

I wanna make a neural network based on tries

don't @ me

@jestdotty I'm familiar, I don't think it applies here. The main problem is that foreign code is allowed to enumerate the member list of modules so there must be a reference to the tree, but the concrete values of constants are what keeps the foreign code objects alive, so the tree cannot reference the constants.

It would be possible to build the relationship differently, for example, foreign code doesn't have to be able to keep the tree alive, but I've decided that dealing with the complexity of a weak reference in the interpreter is preferable because there's expected to be a lot more foreign code.