[Python-Dev] Module cleanup improvement

[Armin Rigo]

Hi Alan,

On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 08:17:02PM -0400, Alan McIntyre wrote:
> Adding a step C1.5 which removes only objects that return true for
> PyInstance_Check seems to prevent the problem exhibited by this bug (I
> tried it out locally on the trunk and it doesn't cause any problems
> with the regression test suite).  Is there any reason that adding such
> a step to module cleanup would be a bad idea?

On another level, would there be interest here for me to revive my old
attempt at throwing away this messy procedure, which only made sense in
a world where reference cycles couldn't be broken?  Nowadays the fact
that global variables suddenly become None when the interpreter shuts
down is a known recipe for getting obscure messages from still-running
threads, for example.

This has one consequence that I can think about: if we consider a
CPython in which the cycle GC has been disabled by the user, then many
__del__'s would not be called any more at interpreter shutdown.  Do we
care?


A bientot,

Armin