On Oct 30, 2008, at 1:31 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
Guido van Rossum wrote:
No offense taken. The V8 experience makes me feel much more
optimistic
that they might actually pull this off. (I'm still skeptical about
support for extension modules, withougt which CPython is pretty
lame.)
The need to modify all extension modules is the usual non-starter I
see mentioned when this topic comes up. The OP really needs to think
about that issue.
It's not a non-starter, it's just a non-finisher. :)
One could take an approach like Apple did for ObjC 2.0: libraries
should be ported over time to be able to work with both refcounting
and automatic-GC runtimes. When you link a program, you can choose to
link it with the automatic GC objc runtime, as long as all the other
frameworks you want to use are compatible with that.
What this would mean in python terms:
- Python would be able to be compiled in either refcounting or auto-gc
mode.
- Extensions can be modified to be compatible with the auto-gc mode
over the timespan of a few years.
- Then when most extensions have been adjusted, auto-gc would become
the default mode for python to be compiled in.
It's seems theoretically entirely doable, but will surely be a lot of
work...someone'd have to be ready to really do the hard work to push
it through to completion.
James
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