Lua's way of memory management is running something called a garbage collector. Every garbage collection cycle, all objects that have no references is freed back up to use to the program. Weak tables are a way to let the garbage collector know that it can go ahead and free up the memory if there are no references to that object anymore.
The weakness of a table is set by the __mode metamethod, if the string of __mode contains k, the keys are weak. If it contains v, the values are weak. If it contains both (kv), both the keys and values are considered weak.
Example:
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local t ={}
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setmetatable(t,{__mode ='k'})
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do
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-- closure
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local key ={}-- key is the reference to this table (object)
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t[key]=123
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end
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collectgarbage()-- force a garbage collection cycle
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-- variable 'key' is out of scope since it was created in a closure
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-- after garbage collection, the object held by key is removed from 't'
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for k, v inpairs(t)do
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print(k, v)
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end
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-- prints nothing
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do
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key ={}
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t[key]=123
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end
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collectgarbage()
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-- key is still valid since it's a global variable