Hi I've tried (and failed) to find what GC details (especially finalizer semantics) are CPython only and which ones are not. The best I could find was the documentation of __del__ here: http://docs.python.org/2/reference/datamodel.html Things were pypy differs: * finalizers in pypy will be called only once, even if the object is resurrected. I'm not sure if this is detail or we're just plain incompatible. * pypy breaks cycles and runs finalizers in random order (but topologically correct), hence gc.garbage is always empty. I *think* this part is really just an implementation detail * we're discussing right now about running multiple finalizers. We want to run them in order, but if there is a link a -> b and a becomes unreachable, we want to reserve the right to call finalizer a then finalizer b, even if a.__del__ resurrects a. What do you think? Overall, the __del__ is baaad. Cheers, fijal