[Python-Dev] Linus on garbage collection (original) (raw)

Michael Foord fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk
Fri May 6 18:31:44 CEST 2011

On 06/05/2011 17:18, skip at pobox.com wrote:

Antoine> Since we're sharing links, here's Matt Mackall's take: Antoine> http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2011-May/031055.html

> From that note: 1: You can't have meaningful destructors, because when destruction happens is undefined. And going-out-of-scope destructors are extremely useful. Python is already a rather broken in this regard, so feel free to ignore this point. Given the presence of cyclic data I don't see how reference counting or garbage collection win. Ignoring the fact that in a pure reference counted system you won't even consider cycles for reclmation, would both RC and GC have to punt because they can't tell which object's destructor to call first?

pypy and .NET choose to arbitrarily break cycles rather than leave objects unfinalised and memory unreclaimed. Not sure what Java does.

All the best,

Michael Foord

Skip

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