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Agreed. If the dictionary is owned by the related class, and classes aren't collected themselves, then there's no point in using an ephemeron table. From a GC perspective, an ephemeron table entry can be seen as a tuple <M, K, V> where V is alive if both M and K are alive. Sort of a strong edge to V from the conjunction of M and K. (A regular strong edge is a tuple <K, V> where V is alive if K is alive.) So if the ephemeron table M is known to be alive, then it collapses down to a regular strong edge, the simplest forms of which are plain properties or dictionaries mapping Ks to Vs.