On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 2:17 PM, Tim Chase <python.l...@tim.thechases.com> wrote: > If you know that you're creating such cyclical structures, it's best > to manually unlink them before freeing them: > > lst = [] > lst.append(lst) # create the cycle > lst[:] = [] # break the cycle > # or lst.remove(lst) # though this takes more care > del lst
In general, this shouldn't be necessary. I believe that reference cycles are guaranteed to be cleaned up in all major implementations of Python, except that in CPython prior to version 3.4 reference cycles containing objects with finalizers would not be collected. So the better advice would be "don't use finalizers in reference cycles if you need compatibility with Python 3.3 or earlier." -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
