RFC: Proposal: Deterministic Object Destruction

[ooomzay at gmail.com]

On Saturday, March 3, 2018 at 4:33:59 PM UTC, Michael Torrie wrote:
> On 03/03/2018 09:02 AM, ooomzay wrote:
> > I can assure you that RAII does what it says on the tin and is relied on in 
> > many critical systems to release resources robustly ... given the 
> > pre-requisite deterministic destruction. 
> 
> Sure but did you read what Paul Moore wrote?  

Yes.

> He said RAII works in C++
> because objects are allocated on the *stack* with strict lifetimes and
> scopes. 

Well he was not telling you the whole story: RAII works just as well with heap objects using smart pointers (unique_ptr and friends) which are a closer analogy to python object references.

> In C++, Heap-allocated objects must still be managed manually, without
> the benefit of RAII, 

No one should be manually managing resources on the heap in C++. They should be using smart pointers.

> for much of the same reasons as people are giving
> here for why RAII is not a good fit for Python.  

...for much the same reasons I am giving here for why RAII could 
be a very good fit for python.

> There are smart pointer
> objects that try to give RAII semantics to heap-allocated objects, with
> varying degrees of success. In other words there are some limitations.

Not sure what limitations you are evoking here but I have not had to write a delete or suffered a resource leak in C++ for many years. (we rolled our own smart pointers before they were standardised).

> Python does not have stack-allocated objects, so the same issues that
> prevent RAII from automatically applying in C++ to heap objects exist here.

False premise, false conclusion.