[Python-Dev] reference leaks, del, and annotations (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Wed Apr 5 01🔞25 CEST 2006

Tim Peters wrote:

A problem is that the variant semantics also seem pretty arbitrary ;-), and there's a dearth of compelling use cases to guide a decision.

At the time I think I suggested that it would be reasonable if weakref callbacks were guaranteed to be called as long as they weren't trash themselves and they didn't reference any trash. From what you said in a recent message, it sounds like that's the way it currently works.

These semantics would be sufficient to be able to use weakrefs to register finalisers, I think. You keep a global list of weakrefs with callbacks that call the finalizer and then remove the weakref from the global list.

I'll put together a prototype some time and see if it works. I actually have a use case at the moment -- a couple of types that need to release external resources, and since they're part of a library I'm distributing, I can't be sure people won't put them in cycles.

-- Greg

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