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

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Sat May 7 01:43:16 CEST 2011

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.

It's only broken if you regard RAII as the One True Way to implement scoped resource management. Python has other approaches to that, such as the with-statement.

Also, you can have destructors that work for objects in cycles, as long as you don't insist on the destructor having access to the object that's being destroyed. Weakref callbacks provide a way of implementing this in CPython.

-- Greg

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list