[Python-Dev] PEP 556: Threaded garbage collection (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Fri Sep 8 15:49:08 EDT 2017

On Fri, 8 Sep 2017 12:40:34 -0700 Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:

PyPy just abandons everything when shutting down, instead of running finalizers. See the last paragraph of : http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/cpythondifferences.html#differences-related-to-garbage-collection-strategies So that might be a useful source of experience.

CPython can be embedded in applications, though, and that is why we try to be a bit more thorough during the interpreter cleanup phase.

Would it make sense to also move signal handlers to run in this thread? Those are the other major source of nasty re-entrancy problems.

See the "Non-goals" section in the PEP, they are already mentioned there :-)

Note I don't think signal handlers are a major source of reentrancy problems, rather minor, since usually you don't try to do much in a signal handler. Signal handling is mostly a relic of 70s Unix design and it has less and less relevance in today's world, apart from the trivial task of telling a process to shut down.

Regards

Antoine.

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