Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote: > Brian Quinlan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >>> Reference counting is inefficient, doesn't by itself handle cycles, >>> and is impractical to combine with threads which run in parallel. The >>> general consensus of modern language implementations is that a tracing >>> GC is the future. >> How is reference counting inefficient?
Do somehow know that tracing GC would be more efficient for typical python programs or are you just speculating? > It involves operations every time an object is merely passed around, > as references to the object are created or destroyed. But if the lifetime of most objects is confined to a single function call, isn't reference counting going to be quite efficient? > It doesn't move objects in memory, and thus free memory is fragmented. OK. Have you had memory fragmentation problems with Python? > Memory allocation can't just chop from from a single area of free memory. > It can't allocate several objects with the cost of one allocation either. I'm not sure what you mean here. Cheers, Brian _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
