[Python-Dev] C API for gc.enable() and gc.disable() (original) (raw)

Bill Janssen janssen at parc.com
Sat Jun 21 19:10:06 CEST 2008

> What follows from that? To me, the natural conclusion is "people who > witness performance problems just need to despair, or accept them, as > they can't do anything about it", however, I don't think this is the > conclusion that you had in mind. >

I can say with complete certainty that of the 20+ programmers I've had working for me, many who have used Python for 3+ years, not a single one would think to question the garbage collector if they observed the kind of quadratic time complexity I've demonstrated. This is not because they are stupid, but because they have only a vague idea that Python even has a garbage collector, never mind that it could be behaving badly for such innocuous looking code.

Perhaps this is something documentation could help. I'm thinking of a one-page checklist listing places they might look for performance problems, that your programmers could work through.

Bill

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