Sorry about the last post. Clicked on send instead of clicking in another application.
On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 12:28 +0200, M.-A. Lemburg wrote: > Mario Frasca wrote: > > On 2006-0925 10:27:16, M.-A. Lemburg wrote: > >> Sounds reasonable, though strictly speaking, the with-container > >> is not necessary, since cursors and connections will close > themselves > >> when garbage collected, ie. as soon as they go out of scope. > > > > this (garbage collected as soon as they go out of scope) is more > > implementation dependent than absolutely true... > > > > the garbage collector is activated "when it feels like", and will > > collect all garbage, or maybe just as much garbage as it is given > time > > to..., again depending on the implementation and the situation. > > This is only true for Jython and perhaps IronPython (I don't know > how objects are managed there). > > In CPython, an object is GCed as soon as the reference count > falls to zero. > > The Python garbage collector is only needed for situations where > you've created circular references keeping a closed set of objects > alive. The Python GC is run every now and then or explicitly > by calling gc.collect(). That could change the day someone decides to re-write CPython with better multi-threaded performance. To be strict, reference counting is a garbage collecting method itself, although it needs to be complemented with a circular references detector. It's also a garbage collecting method that generaly performs poorly in multi-threaded environments, thus we might want to replace it eventually. One should not write code that depends on the garbage collector. Even with reference counting, it's not 100% deterministic since reference counting won't free circular referenced objects. Remeber: garbage collecting is about freeing unused memory, not other resources. _______________________________________________ DB-SIG maillist - DB-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/db-sig
