Re: The Joy of Python

On 16 Apr 2024 18:42:09 GMT, rbowman wrote:

Of course reference counting never ever goes wrong.

I think the term is “ORC”, for “cycles + reference counting”. Both Perl
and Python do it. The idea is to do reference counting as far as possible,
and only fall back to full-on garbage collection when you hit cases that
need it.

This way, it is fairly easy to write a well-behaved Python program whose
memory usage will stay within reasonable bounds, even after running for a
long time. Unlike Java, for example, which will happily chew up all the
RAM on your system if you let it.

There is a downside, in that maintaining those reference counts reduces
the concurrency when trying to do multithreading. The Python folks have a
solution to that, which will take a bit of work to do correctly, but which
is slowly going in.