July 21, 2018
10:50 a.m.
You wrote:
I'd argue that the ref counts are not interesting at all, only a side effect of one possible solution to the object life time problem.
I'm happy for you to regard multi-core reference counting (MCRC) as a toy problem, which won't become part of useful software.
Perhaps the point was that reference counting is only one of the issues (race conditions?) the GIL solves. So a GIL - free reference counting scheme may not prove to be helpful. If that were it, we could (optionally) turn off reference counting in multi-threaded code, and run a garbage collector once in a while instead. After all, cPython’s (mostly) deterministic garbage collection is not guaranteed by the language standard. -CHB