On 11/12/2019 14:17, Musbur wrote:
Am 10.12.2019 22:33 schrieb Paul Moore:
You do understand that the reference counting garbage collector is an
implementation detail of the CPython implementation *only*, don't you?
I don't think that's true. Here's a sentonce from near the top of the
"gc" module documentation of Python 3:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/gc.html#module-gc
"Since the collector supplements the reference counting already used in
Python, you can disable the collector if you are sure your program does
not create reference cycles."
The way I read this is that Python automatically and immediately deletes
objects once their refcount goes to zero, and the garbage collector only
kicks in case of circular references or other obscure circumstances. The
documentation makes no reference to the specific Python implementation,
so I believe this is true for CPython as well as others.
That's a bug in the documentation, and needs fixing; thanks for pointing
it out! It is certainly true that some other Python implementations
(Jython for example) do not use reference counting, and disabling the
collector may have further-reaching implications for those
implementations. I can't speak to the details; the only other
implementation I use is Micropython, and I don't use that often enough
to have cared about the details of garbage collection beyond noting that
it's different to CPython.
--
Rhodri James *-* Kynesim Ltd
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