Exceptions and Object Destruction (was: Problem with apsw and garbage collection)

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

In message <7x7hzbv14a.fsf at ruckus.brouhaha.com>,  wrote:

> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo at geek-central.gen.new_zealand> writes:
>
>> > Reference counting is an implementation detail used by CPython but not
>> > [implementations built on runtimes designed for corporate-herd-oriented
>> > languages, like] IronPython or Jython.
>> 
>> I rest my case.
> 
> You're really being pretty ignorant.  I don't know of any serious Lisp
> system that uses reference counting, both for performance reasons and
> to make sure cyclic structures are reclaimed properly.

Both of which, oddly enough, more modern dynamic languages like Python 
manage perfectly well.