Python's biggest compromises

[Ian Bicking]

On Fri, 2003-08-01 at 02:04, Hannu Kankaanpää wrote:
> Worst of both indeed. Maybe the decision to choose reference
> counting was driven by speed considerations. 

Reference counting spreads the speed hit over the entire program, while
other techniques tend to hit performance hard every so often.  But all
together I think reference counting is usually slower than a good GC
algorithm, and incremental garbage collection algorithms can avoid
stalling.  And I'm sure that the current state -- references counting
plus another kind of garbage collection for circular references -- must
be worse than either alone.  The advantage is predictable collection
(unless you are using Jython), without memory leaks (due to circular
references).

Oh well...

  Ian