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

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Sat May 7 01:25:09 CEST 2011

Neal Becker wrote:

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2002-08/msg00552.html

There, Linus says

For example, if you have an explicit refcounting system, then it is quite natural to have operations like ...

notet *node = *np; if (node->count > 1) newnode = copyalloc(node);

It's interesting to note that, even though you can get reference count information in CPython, it's not all that useful for doing things like that, because it's hard to be sure how many incidental references have been created on the way to the code concerned. So tricks like this at the Python level aren't really feasible in any robust way.

-- Greg

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