ephemeron

English

Etymology

Borrowed from Ancient Greek ἐφήμερον (ephḗmeron), neuter form of ἐφήμερος (ephḗmeros).

Noun

ephemeron (plural ephemera)

1. Something short-lived or transitory.
   • 1834, Lydia Sigourney, Poems, To the Memeory of a Young Lady, page 64:

     Ah!—so frail are we—
     So like the brief ephemeron that wheels
     Its momentary round, we scarce can weep
     Our own bereavements, ere we haste to share
     The clay with those we mourn.

2. (programming) A type of weak reference in a garbage collected programming language that does not permit an object to be kept alive by its finalizer.
   • 2020, KC Sivaramakrishnan et al., Retrofitting Parallelism onto OCaml‎^[1]:

     Beyond type safety, OCaml has several features that closely interact with the garbage collector. These include weak references, finalisers, ephemerons, and lazy values, whose semantics will have to be preserved with the new GC so as to not break programs that use those features.

Related terms

• ephemeral
• ephemeric