Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettin...@gmail.com> added the comment:
I'm unclear whether you're reporting a true leak (one that can't be cleaned-up by a call to gc.collect()) or just a garden variety circular reference that will eventually free, just not as quickly as it would with straight reference counting applied when there are no circular references. FWIW, there wasn't a backport because the latter case wasn't deemed to be bug. Circular references are allowed -- we just wait on GC to clean them up. Another consideration was that the weakref proxy alternative was much slower than the existing code (that mattered less in Python 3 where we have a C implementation of OrderedDict, giving more freedom for the pure python version to adopt a less performant but more memory friendly alternative). There is a little more history here as well. There used to be a __del__() method to accelerate the reclamation of memory but that was slow and it occasionally caused other problems such as the creation of an unreclaimable zombie object. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <https://bugs.python.org/issue35030> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
