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

Glyph Lefkowitz glyph at twistedmatrix.com
Fri May 6 19:07:44 CEST 2011

On May 6, 2011, at 12:31 PM, Michael Foord wrote:

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

I think that's a mischaracterization of their respective collectors; "arbitrarily break cycles" implies that user code would see broken or incomplete objects, at least during finalization, which I'm fairly sure is not true on either .NET or PyPy.

Java definitely has a collector that can handles cycles too. (None of these are reference counting.)

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