Remove NSObject.methodMap or make it thread-safe

[Marcono1234]

The field NSObject.methodMap is of type HashMap and is accessed without any synchronization:

Java-Objective-C-Bridge/src/main/java/ca/weblite/objc/NSObject.java

Line 72 in 62409c5

private static Map<Class,Map<String,Method>> methodMap = new HashMap<Class,Map<String,Method>>();

However, if access it correctly synchronized it would still be a memory leak because the map would constantly grow and is never cleared.
Would it maybe make sense to make this an instance field (i.e. remove static)? Though I am not very familiar with this project and what performance implications this would have.

[shannah]

The method map serves as a sort of vtable for looking up the Java method to use for handling a given Objective-C method selector. Each subclass of NSObject will have a corresponding entry. Conceptually this is static with a one-to-one correspondence between a Java class and a method table.

To satisfy your concern about growing without bound, perhaps it should be changed to a WeakHashMap so that if the class is GC'd, its method table will be cleaned up.

[Marcono1234]

Ah, right then it would likely not be a memory leak because there will only be a limited amount of classes. But using a WeakHashMap might be useful nonetheless to allow removal when a custom class loader which loaded the class is unloaded? However, that might make synchronization more complicated / inefficient.