[Python-Dev] Linus on garbage collection

[Michael Foord]

On 06/05/2011 18:07, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:
> On May 6, 2011, at 12:31 PM, Michael Foord wrote:
>
>> pypy and .NET choose to arbitrarily break cycles rather than leave 
>> objects unfinalised and memory unreclaimed. Not sure what Java does.
>
> I think that's a mischaracterization of their respective collectors; 
> "arbitrarily break cycles" implies that user code would see broken or 
> incomplete objects, at least during finalization, which I'm fairly 
> sure is not true on either .NET or PyPy.

http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2008/02/python-finalizers-semantics-part-1.html

"Therefore we decided to break such a cycle at an arbitrary place, which 
doesn't sound too insane."

All the best,

Michael Foord
>
> Java definitely has a collector that can handles cycles too.  (None of 
> these are reference counting.)
>
> -glyph


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