Garbage collection and closure

Question

I am running a remote script from bridge that opens a complex dialog in photoshop. I need to run the dialog in photoshop because it displays fonts, styles and actions, which are not available in bridge.
When I close the dialog I return to my bridge script. If I repeated open the remote script with the complex dialog I continue to use up resources and the dialog opens more slowly each time.
If I run the remote script directly from the ESTK I still lose reources and it slows down, but not as significantly as when run as a remote script via bridgetalk.
I think this is caused by inner functions in my dialog, which are creating closures, which in turn are preventing garbage collection.
Has anyone experienced this and do you have any tips to prevent the performance degradation?

Answer 1

Rory,
I've never seen that before. In PS, the script that displays the dialog executes, then the engine that ran it supposed to be destroyed. Should be no need for garbage collection. Running the script directly in ESTK still uses BridgeTalk, so I would expect little difference.
I'd be curious to know what's happening because each time you run the script, it should be using a fresh scripting engine in PS. Perhaps there's something preventing PS from releasing the engine when BridgeTalk is involved. It that's the case, it would be a bug.
I do have a suggestion - instead of switching to PS, why not ask PS to give you lists of fonts, styles, and actions? You could write a script that put all three into a an array:
// up here create the arrays
var a = new Array();
a[0] = fontArray;
a[1] = styleArray;
a[2] = actionArray;
a.toSource();
eval'ing the message body in the onResult handler would give you all the info you needed to show your dialog in Bridge. Both Bridge and PS use scriptUI, so the dialog you have written should work in either (once you get the information necessary to display it in Bridge).