Real Problems with Python

[Aahz Maruch]

In article <slrn8ahb3s.mf.daniels at localhost.localdomain>,
Alan Daniels <daniels at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>My question is: How hard would it be to keep the reference counting,
>but add a built-in function, maybe called "gc()", that would walk
>through all the existing objects, find the ones that have been
>orphaned due to cyclical references, and reclaim them? Would something
>like that be enough to make everybody happy? Possibly implemented as a
>patch so that it was optional? It would still be deterministic (in
>that __del__ would always get called right away, when appropriate),
>but would still make sure that no objects were ever left unreclaimed
>indefinitely.

That is precisely what the middle-grounders have been suggesting.  It's
still not trivial, especially if you want the garbage collection to work
on memory allocated by extensions.
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