[Python-Dev] reference leaks, __del__, and annotations

[Guido van Rossum]

On 4/3/06, Michael Hudson <mwh at python.net> wrote:
> I'm not sure the problem is so much that anyone _wants_ to support
> resurrection in __del__, it's just that it can't be prevented.

Well, Java has an answer to that (at least I believe Tim Peters told
me so years ago): it allows resurrection, but will only call the
finalizer once. IOW if the resurrected object is GC'ed a second time,
its finalizer won't be called. This would require a bit "__del__
already called" on an object, but don't we have a whole word of
GC-related flags?

--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)