Holding onto objects too long

[PH0lder]

If a person were to make a large circular buffer, and fill it up and subsequently empty it, all the objects placed into it have a strong reference, and thus can't be garbage collected, until they're overwritten by new objects which will then have the same problem. To fix this, your get() method should assign the element in the array to null when the object is returned.

[adamretter]

@PH0lder I have had a look at this but I am not sure I can do that without breaking the existing behaviour of get on an Unordered Ring Buffer.

For example, if I had the suggested entries[readIdx] = null; at line 169 of RingBuffer.java, then the test in RingBufferTest.java: putGetPutGetUnordered(7, 10, 2, 2, 16) shows the following behaviour:

capacity(7):

 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
[N, N, N, N, N, N, N]

put1(10):

[a, b, c, d, e, f, g]
[h, i, j            ]
=>
[h, i, j, d, e, f, g]

get1(2):

[N, N, j, d, e, f, g]

put2(2):

[N, N, j, d, e, f, g]
[         a, b      ]
=>
[N, N, j, a, b, f, g]

get2(16):

[N, N, j, a, b, f, g]

The second get operation (get2) is now returning the wrong results, it should have returned: [a, b, f, g, h, i, j]