ESR "Waning of Python" post

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Oct 13, 2018 at 7:25 AM Vito De Tullio <vito.detullio at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Chris Angelico wrote:
>
> >> Reference counting was likely a bad idea to begin with.
> >
> > Then prove CPython wrong by making a fantastically better
> > implementation that uses some other form of garbage collection.
>
> I'm not talking about the "goodness" of the implemetations, but AFAIK jython
> and ironpython doesn't have the refcount gb (and they don't even have the
> GIL...)
>

Yes, which proves that it's viable. I notice that neither of them has
swept CPython away by massively outperforming them, so perhaps
reference counting isn't such a terrible idea after all?

I'm not disputing that refcounting has its downsides, but "likely a
bad idea to begin with" seems to be a bit beyond reasonable.

ChrisA