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

Mark Shannon marks at dcs.gla.ac.uk
Fri May 6 18:33:03 CEST 2011

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?

It doesn't matter which is called first. In fact, the VM could call all the destructors at the same time if the machine has enough cores and there's no GIL.

All objects are kept alive by the GC until after the destructors are called. Those that are still dead will have their memory reclaimed.

Skip

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