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[Python-ideas] Python 3000 TIOBE -3%

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Feb 9 19:26:07 CET 2012 
On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 10:14 AM, Masklinn <masklinn at masklinn.net> wrote:

> On 2012-02-09, at 19:03 , Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> > The choice of which garbage collection implementation (ref counting is
> garbage collection) is a quality of implementation detail, not a language
> feature.
>
> That's debatable, it's an implementation detail with very different
> semantics which tends to leak out into usage patterns of the language (as
> it did with CPython, which basically did not get fixed in the community
> until Pypy started ascending),


I think it was actually Jython that first sensitized the community to this
issue.


> especially when the language does not provide "better" ways to handle
> things (as Python finally did by adding context managers in 2.5).
>
> So theoretically, automatic refcounting is a detail, but practically it
> influences language usage differently than most other GC techniques (when
> it'd the only GC strategy in the language anyway)
>

Are there still Python idioms/patterns/recipes around that depend on
refcounting? (There also used to be some well-known anti-patterns that were
only bad because of the refcounting, mostly around saving exceptions. But
those should all have melted away -- CPython has had auxiliary GC for over
a decade.)

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