[XML-SIG] Re: FREE DOM

[Fredrik Lundh]

> One solution is to require calling a .destroy() (or
>similarly-named) method when you're done with a node.  The method
>would then do something like:
>
> def destroy(self):
>     del self.parent
>            for i in self.children:
>         i.destroy()
>     del self.children
>
>This is simple to implement, but it means that you have to remember to
>call .destroy().  Does anyone see a representation that would avoid
>the necessity of doing this?  I was thinking of just having .children
>in each node, and then there would be a global dictionary that mapped
>nodes to their parent objects.  Because it's global, it wouldn't
>participate in any cycles, but cleaning it up is also a pain.  

Yup. *When* should you do the clean-up in that case?  Since all
nodes will have an extra reference (from the global dictionary),
they'll never go away unless you explicitly call a cleanup function...

(alright, you can have a "purge" function that kills nodes with
reference count=1, and use a background thread to call that
function now and then...)

I definitely prefer the "destroy" pattern (or rather, I prefer to
use visitors for this, but that's another story).

> Anyone have a suggestion?  (Other than continually visiting
>Guido and whining for non-refcounting GC?)

Well, I see no reason why you cannot keep on doing that as well ;-)

Cheers /F

PS. Does anyone have pointers to SAXDOM and/or FreeDOM?