[Python-Dev] Garbage collecting closures (original) (raw)

Paul Prescod paul@prescod.net
Fri, 11 Apr 2003 19:03:40 -0700

Guido van Rossum wrote:

...

On my Python, it just counts up. "a" gets more and more referrers and they are "cell" objects. If it is unknown, I'll submit a bug report unless someone fixes it before I get to it. ;) If I use a "while 1" loop, the count never goes above 225.

Just FYI, even if it wouldn't have leaked forever, it caused me serious pain because it kept a reference to a COM object. The process wouldn't die until the object died and all of my usual techniques for breaking circular references were of no avail. I even tried nasty hacks like globals.clear() and self.dict.clear(). But there was no circular reference to be broken.

Paul Prescod