Jython, GILs and object locking.

[Skip Montanaro]

    Carl> Of course, that would require a whole new garbage collection
    Carl> scheme.  But honestly, that's probably simple compared to getting
    Carl> rid of reference counting and the GIL.

You shouldn't make statements you can't back up with facts. ;-) In fact, the
general case of switching from purely reference counting to purely garbage
collection is also a hard problem.  You might find Neil Schemenaneur's
introduction to the current cyclic garbage collector interesting:

    http://arctrix.com/nas/python/gc/

Aside from the nasty interaction of traditional garbage collection with
extension modules which Neil mentions, you also lose a certain amount of
determinism when freeing objects like files which hold scarce system
resources and thus force programmers to explicitly close all such objects.

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