<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On May 6, 2011, at 12:31 PM, Michael Foord wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: Menlo; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: monospace; ">pypy and .NET choose to arbitrarily break cycles rather than leave objects unfinalised and memory unreclaimed. Not sure what Java does.<br></span></span></blockquote></div><br><div>I think that's a mischaracterization of their respective collectors; "arbitrarily break cycles" implies that user code would see broken or incomplete objects, at least during finalization, which I'm fairly sure is not true on either .NET or PyPy.</div><div><br></div><div>Java definitely has a collector that can handles cycles too. (None of these are reference counting.)</div><div><br></div><div>-glyph</div></body></html>