Raymond Hettinger wrote: > [Michele Simionato] >> Here and there I hear rumors about deprecating __del__ and >> nothing >> happens, are there any news about that? Expecially concerning Py3k? > > I was writing a Py3K PEP advocating the elimination of __del__ > because: > > * 'with closing()' and try/finally are the preferred ways of calling > close() > > * it is easy to accidently keep or introduce a reference that blocks > the __del__ logic > > * under-the-hood, the implementation of __del__ clashes badly with GC > logic and is a maintenance nightmare > > * the body of a __del__ method may unintentionally resurrect an object > that was in the process of being deleted > > For the PEP to have a chance, I neede to make build-outs to the > weakref module so that existing use cases for __del__ can be easily > migrated. That hasn't been done yet, so the campaign to eliminate > __del__ is stalled.
There were also a few recipes posted during this discussion that wrap weakrefs up a bit nicer so it's easier to use them in place of __del__: http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/519635 http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/519610 http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/519621 Since they're using weakrefs, you shouldn't have to worry about some of the weirdness of __del__. STeVe -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
