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

Stefan Behnel stefan_ml at behnel.de
Fri May 6 18:51:37 CEST 2011

Mark Shannon, 06.05.2011 18:33:

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.

May I quote you on that one the next time my software crashes?

It may not make a difference for the runtime, but the difference for user software may be "dead" or "alive".

Stefan

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