[Python-Dev] Linus on garbage collection

[Gregory P. Smith]

On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 9:18 AM,  <skip at pobox.com> wrote:
>
>    Antoine> Since we're sharing links, here's Matt Mackall's take:
>    Antoine> http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/2011-May/031055.html
>
> >From that note:
>
>    1: You can't have meaningful destructors, because when destruction
>    happens is undefined. And going-out-of-scope destructors are extremely
>    useful. Python is already a rather broken in this regard, so feel free
>    to ignore this point.

Python being "broken" in this regard is pretty much exactly why
__enter__, __exit__ and with as context managers were added to the
language.

That gives the ability to have the equivalent of well defined nested
scopes that destroy something (exit) deterministically much as it is
easy to do in C++ with some {}s and a ~destructor().

It is not broken, just different.

-gps