[Python-ideas] Python 3000 TIOBE -3%

[Masklinn]

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), 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)