[Python-Dev] Garbage collecting closures

[Paul Prescod]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
>...

>>
>>On my Python, it just counts up. "a" gets more and more referrers and 
>>they are "cell" objects. If it is unknown, I'll submit a bug report 
>>unless someone fixes it before I get to it. ;)
> 
> 
> If I use a "while 1" loop, the count never goes above 225.

Just FYI, even if it wouldn't have leaked forever, it caused me serious 
pain because it kept a reference to a COM object. The process wouldn't 
die until the object died and all of my usual techniques for breaking 
circular references were of no avail. I even tried nasty hacks like 
globals.clear() and self.__dict__.clear(). But there was no circular 
reference to be broken.

  Paul Prescod