Hi Leonardo, Leonardo Santagada wrote: > On Jan 3, 2009, at 4:18 AM, Paolo Giarrusso wrote: > >> There was, luckily, somebody on the mailing list who said "maybe we >> should drop refcounting", but people didn't listen for some reason. > > > You repeated this meme many times in your emails, so I thought that > maybe you really didn't see the full picture. This is what I > understand from the reasoning behind it. > > Dropping refcounting and move to free threading would completely break > all C modules so they would have to be rewritten and would make the > CPython API much more complex and integration with C libraries hard. > That's why no one took it seriously. Think like this, breaking all c > modules would make CPython as usable as haskell :), or just look at > the number of libraries not available right now for Python 3.0. > > It is not some retarded choice made by GvR, but a pragmatic one. > Python as a language used by millions of people can't completely > change semantics from version to version.
While I understand the reasoning above, I don't agree with the last paragraph. Switching to a different GC doesn't lead to that huge a change in semantics. There are subtle difference about finalizers (see the blog posts about that: http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2008/02/python-finalizers-semantics-part-1.html http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2008/02/python-finalizers-semantics-part-2.html It definitely leads to a different C API, of course. Thus your above points remain valid. Cheers, Carl Friedrich _______________________________________________ [email protected] http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/pypy-dev
