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

Michael Foord fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk
Fri May 6 19:12:51 CEST 2011

On 06/05/2011 18:07, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:

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.

http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2008/02/python-finalizers-semantics-part-1.html

"Therefore we decided to break such a cycle at an arbitrary place, which doesn't sound too insane."

All the best,

Michael Foord

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

-- http://www.voidspace.org.uk/

May you do good and not evil May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others May you share freely, never taking more than you give. -- the sqlite blessing http://www.sqlite.org/different.html

-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20110506/3afbfd6a/attachment.html>

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list