Antoine Pitrou <pit...@free.fr> added the comment: > When did that happen? I agree with Raymond. The cyclic gc should just > reclaim cycles.
People don't care about referential cycles, they care about freeing some memory (if memory was available in infinite quantities nobody would care about breaking cycles). That's how the API is used most of the time, IMO. And that's why measurements of the usefulness of calling gc.collect() are usually done in megabytes, not in number of references :-). So, while I agree that it sounds bizarre for the GC to do other memory-related tasks, it's also quite practical. Besides, the GC already has a heuristic for *when* to cleanup memory, and it makes sense to reuse this heuristic for other memory cleanup tasks, rather than to invent another heuristic or put the burden of the task on the user (who usually won't even know what those freelists are). ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue6695> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
