Tagging

About

Tagging is a term used in Tome to refer to automatically disposing of Instances via a CollectionService tag.

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How does it work?

Tags are useful in the sense that once an Instance gets a tag, and later down that same Instance gets destroyed by most methods e.g. Instance:Destroy, Instance:Remove and Instance.Parent = nil.

Traditionally you would check if an object was destroyed with:

local part: BasePart = workspace.Part

part.Destroying:Once(function()
    print("destroyed")
end)

However the only time this Signal gets fired is when object:Destroy is called. And sometimes other libraries, or older code may not behave that way. Moreover, creating a connection for checking every Instance can become expensive, and can build up more technial debt with more complex systems.

CollectionService:GetInstanceRemovedSignal will pick up on the object being destroyed, which from there the Tome can dispose of it from its own objects dictionary.

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Why use it?

This is especially useful for objects that may get prematurely destroyed by the void, or external scripts that don't use a garbage collection module.

Most garbage collection modules will eventually remove the object from memory if they're added, so it's generally case specific, and also how long you're okay with keeping that Instance in-memory for.

Long round-based games such as races may benefit from this with vehicles that can get destroyed incorrectly. Resulting in vehicles remaining in memory until the round collector frees them.