[issue21351] refcounts not respected at process exit

[Antoine Pitrou]

Antoine Pitrou added the comment:

Looking into it, it's normal for refcounts to be "ignored": those objects belong to reference cycles:

tstgc.__dict__
-> p (or c, or c2)
-> p.__class__ (i.e. Parent, or Child respectivel))
-> Parent.__dict__
-> Parent.__del__ (or Parent.__init__, or Parent.child)
-> Parent.__del__.__globals__ (which is tstgc.__dict__)

Since p, c, c2 belong to reference cycles, they get collected in an undefined order.

Obviously, Parent.__del__ is buggy (it runs into an infinite loop when self.children != 0).

Before Python 3.4, the module globals would have been set to None at shutdown, which would have broken those cycles, but caused other well-known problems. It's probably impossible to find a scheme that satisfies all constraints, so we'll see in the future if the new scheme brings more drawbacks than advantages (right now, my own evaluation is obviously that it's a step forward).

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue21351>
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