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

Gregory P. Smith greg at krypto.org
Fri May 6 18:32:51 CEST 2011

On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 9:18 AM, <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.

Python being "broken" in this regard is pretty much exactly why enter, exit and with as context managers were added to the language.

That gives the ability to have the equivalent of well defined nested scopes that destroy something (exit) deterministically much as it is easy to do in C++ with some {}s and a ~destructor().

It is not broken, just different.

-gps

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