On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 04:13:12PM -0500, Daniel Stutzbach wrote:
Based on the description, it still resorts to zapping module globals by setting them to None. It zaps them to weakrefs first, which means that globals are more likely to be valid during __del__, but it still cannot make any guarantees and referencing globals from __del__ is still a bad idea. Is that a correct synopsis?
Yes, it does still resort to setting globals to None. However, the weakref step makes it much more likely that __del__ methods run before that happens. After this change, referencing global variables from __del__ methods is okay. What is not a good idea is creating __del__ methods that are part of a reference cycle (i.e. an island of references) and also refer to that cycle somehow. That has never been a good idea and those __del__ methods will never get run, before or after the proposed change. HTH, Neil