[Python-Dev] What is the precise problem? [was: Reference cycles in Exception.traceback] (original) (raw)

Maciej Fijalkowski fijall at gmail.com
Mon Mar 10 13:11:40 CET 2014

On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 12:10 PM, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:

2014-03-08 16:30 GMT+01:00 Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com>:

How about fixing cyclic gc to deal with del instead? That sounds like an awful change to the semantics. Hum? That's the purpose of the PEP 442 which is implemented in Python 3.4. As I wrote, it's not enough to fix all issues. Usually, I see an explicit call to gc.collect() as a workaround to a deeper issue. I prefer to modify my program to run smoothly without explict garbage collection. That's why I would prefer to avoid creating reference cycles from the beginning. Victor

It was agreed long time ago that the immediate finalization is an implementation specific detail and it's not guaranteed. You should not rely on __del__s being called timely one way or another. Why would you require this for the program to work correctly in the particular example of traceback?

Cheers, fijal

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