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- Subject: RE: garbage collection thoughts... again?!
- From: Thatcher Ulrich <tu@...>
- Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 20:57:07 -0400 (EDT)
On Thu, 29 May 2003, Nick Trout wrote:
>
> I'm not sure what Python does with these containers; perhaps they
> have write barriers and they use mark and sweep?!
Looks like they have an optional incremental generational
mark-sweep-like thing, that cooperates with ref-counting. I found
this explanation which is pretty clear:
http://arctrix.com/nas/python/gc/
> One of the reasons I moved away from Python towards
> Lua was that you don't have to deal with reference counting in the
> Lua API - which caused several annoying bugs when I first started
> using it. Lua is much simpler and it looks like Python is more
> complicated than when I left it.
Yeah, agreed about the ref-counting garbage in the Python API. That
looks very error-prone. I think the Lua API takes a safer approach by
requiring you to work through the Lua stack & registry/globals. Lua's
API is encapsulated enough that C programmers don't need to know how
Lua does its GC.
-Thatcher