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why python annoys me

D-Man dsh8290 at rit.edu
Thu Apr 19 13:22:57 EDT 2001 
On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 05:57:28PM +0200, Rolf Magnus wrote:
| Jaap Spies wrote:
| 
| > Did you give Jython a try? With Jython you can use the 'nice things of
| > Python' with the best of Java.
| 
| With "the best of Java", do you mean the poor memory management? I heard 
| that's one of the biggest difference between Python and Jython.

He meant the extensive libraries that exist and are being made and
"sold" (ie convincing management that java & libs are good) rapidly.

Yes, Jython and CPython (Jython is Python, you know :-)) have
different memory management techniques.  CPython is implemented in C,
where malloc/free are used to manage memory, and it is the programmers
job to do it right.  CPython chooses to use reference counting to
determine whether or not a Python object needs to/should be freed at
any given time.  Jython is implemented in Java.  As such it runs on
top of a JVM.  As a result Jython can not do any better than the JVM's
garbage collector for freeing memory becuase java does not provide a
manual mechanism like free().  A design decision, no doubt influenced
by this fact, in Jython is to use the JVM's gc to handle the memory
management and not bother with ref counting at all.  So yes, Jython
does have just as much memory problems as Java because Jython is a
Java program.

-D
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