Reference counting garbage collection

Eyal Lotem eyal at hyperroll.com
Sun Aug 26 15:06:04 EDT 2001


Tim Peters wrote:

> [Marcin 'Qrczak']
>> Would it work for Python to not heap-allocate ints but tag them in
>> the lowest bit, assuming pointers are even?
> 
> No, and for several reasons.  The most obvious one is that Python runs on
> word-addressed machines, where no bits of a pointer are abusable.
Unless Python runs a more strict allocation policy (Allocate only 
even-numbered dwords, or limit the allocation storage to half the size).




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