[Python-ideas] feature to make traceback objects usable without references to frame locals and globals

[Guido van Rossum]

On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 4:45 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> Also note that garbage collection will not necessarily do what
> the user expects: it is well possible that big amounts of
> memory will stay allocated as unused space in pymalloc.
> This is not specific to the discussed case, but still a valid
> user concern. Greg Hazel observed this situation in his
> example.

Aha. So whereas the process size ballooned, there is no actual memory
leak (his example threw away the exception each time through the
loop), it's just that looking at process size is a bad way to assess
memory leaks. I would like to reject this then as "that's just how
Python's memory allocation works". As you say, it's not specific to
this case; it comes up occasionally and it's just a matter of user
education.

I don't think anything should be done about __traceback__ either --
frameworks that have this problem can work around it in various ways.
Or, at least I don't see a reason to panic and roll back the feature.
Maybe eventually it can be improved by adding some kind of
functionality to control some details of the behavior.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)