On 2012-02-09, at 19:26 , Guido van Rossum wrote:
On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 10:14 AM, Masklinn <masklinn@masklinn.net> wrote:
On 2012-02-09, at 19:03 , Steven D'Aprano wrote:
The choice of which garbage collection implementation (ref counting is garbage collection) is a quality of implementation detail, not a language feature.
That's debatable, it's an implementation detail with very different semantics which tends to leak out into usage patterns of the language (as it did with CPython, which basically did not get fixed in the community until Pypy started ascending),
I think it was actually Jython that first sensitized the community to this issue.
The first one was Jython yes, of course, but I did not see the "movement" gain much prominence before Pypy started looking like a serious CPython alternative, before that there were a few voices lost in the desert.
especially when the language does not provide "better" ways to handle things (as Python finally did by adding context managers in 2.5).
So theoretically, automatic refcounting is a detail, but practically it influences language usage differently than most other GC techniques (when it'd the only GC strategy in the language anyway)
Are there still Python idioms/patterns/recipes around that depend on refcounting?
There shouldn't be, but I'm not going to rule out reliance on automatic resource cleanup just yet, I'm sure there are still significant pieces of code using those in the wild.