RFC: Proposal: Deterministic Object Destruction

[Dietmar Schwertberger]

On 2/28/2018 11:51 PM, ooomzay at gmail.com wrote:
> This PEP proposes that valid python interpreters *must* synchronously destroy objects when the last reference to an object goes out of scope. This interpreter behaviour is currently permitted and exhibited by the reference implementation [CPython], but it is optional.

CPython does *not* guarantee destruction when the object reference goes 
out of scope, even if there are no other references.
I would very much appreciate such a deterministic behaviour, at least 
with CPython.

I recently had to debug an issue in the matplotlib wx backend (*). Under 
certain conditions, the wx device context was not destroyed when the 
reference went out of scope. Adding a del to the end of the method or 
calling the Destroy method of the context did fix the issue. (There was 
also a hidden reference, but avoiding this was not sufficient. The del 
was still required.)

(*) https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/10174

Regards,

Dietmar