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. -- Leonardo Santagada santagada at gmail.com