[Python-Dev] del and tp_dealloc in the IO lib (original) (raw)

Gregory P. Smith greg at krypto.org
Mon Jan 19 02:38:18 CET 2009

+1 on getting rid of the IOBase del in the C rewrite in favor of tp_dealloc.

On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 11:53 PM, Christian Heimes <lists at cheimes.de> wrote:

Brett Cannon schrieb: > Fine by me. People should be using the context manager for guaranteed > file closure anyway IMO.

Yes they should. (how I really really wish i didn't have to use 2.4 anymore ;)

But lets at least be clear that is never acceptable for a python implementation to leak file descriptors/handles (or other system resources), they should be closed and released whenever the particular GC implementation gets around to it.

You make a very good point! Perhaps we should stop promising that files get closed as soon as possible and encourage people in using the with statement. Christian

eegads, do we actually -promise- that somewhere? If so I'll happily go update those docs with a caveat.

I regularly point out in code reviews that the very convenient and common idiom of open(name, 'w').write(data) doesn't guarantee when the file will be closed; its up to the GC implementation details. Good code should never depend on the GC for a timely release of scarce external resources (file descriptors/handles). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20090119/a593d5c7/attachment.htm>

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