Would it be safe to use get_instance_id to make a "Set"

[system]

	Attention	Topic was automatically imported from the old Question2Answer platform.
	Asked By	Aristonaut

I want to store a bunch of weak references to objects in a set-like datastructure. I am thinking of doing something like the following, where set is a dictionary:

set[obj.get_instance_id()] = weakref( obj )

I think this will work, but there isn’t too much documentation of get_instance_id. It sounds straightforward, but I want to make sure there are no unspoken caveats. Will the above always result in only one weakref per object added to the list?

Also, I will be looping over the values more than looking them up. Would it be better to use an array, then?

Thanks

[system]

	Reply From:	2D

Yup, your logic will work. The instance_id is unique for each object. It just gets incremented internally in the ObjectDB class - that’s why there is no Object property for it.

I recommend just using the dictionary b/c it will give you some extra goodies that the array won’t.

The Array will be faster, but not by much. I just ran a small test (3 times each) where I iterated an array/dict of 100 objects and the array did it in 175 usecs versus 195 usecs for the dictionary.