Jim Jewett wrote:
The checkins list has been struggling with generator reference leaks; the latest conclusion was that some are unavoidable because of __del__ cycles. That sort of defeats the purpose of resource managers.
Seems to me we need a whole new approach to finalization that's friendly to cyclic gc, such as a way of registering a finalizer that doesn't depend on the original object. If such a mechanism were available, could it be used instead of a __del__ method to clean up after a generator? (I'm asking because I'm not sure exactly what a generator __del__ needs to do.)
As a strawman proposal:
deletes = [(obj.__del__.cycle, obj) for obj in cycle if hasattr(obj, "__del__") and hasattr(obj.__del__, "cycle")] deletes.sort() for (cycle, obj) in deletes: obj.__del__()
I think we need to be very careful about doing anything like this. From what Tim said recently, the consequences of an object getting its __del__ annotation wrong could be as bad as crashing the interpreter. -- Greg