Question about garbage collection

[Donn Cave]

Quoth "Martin Bertolino" <martinb at talx.com.no.spam>:
| I was looking at the C source for the Pyhon intepreter and I have noticed
| that it uses a reference counting mechanism for it garbage collection
| scheme. I like the simplicity of this scheme, but I know it has problems
| with data structures that have references to themselves, no being properly
| collected and eventually leaked.
|
| In real/average/day to day development of applications in Python, how often
| does this becomes a problem?, and how do you code around it, if possible?

For some it's never a problem.  Applications with a Python GUI seem
to be particularly prone to cyclic references.  I can't account for
that without thinking some more about it, but it does fit with my
experience.

I don't know of any generic solution, the main thing is to be aware
of the potential for trouble in the first place.

	Donn Cave, donn at oz.net