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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: The Joy of Python
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2024 00:59:59 -0000 (UTC)
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On 16 Apr 2024 18:42:09 GMT, rbowman wrote:

> Of course reference counting never ever goes wrong.

I think the term is “ORC”, for “cycles + reference counting”. Both Perl 
and Python do it. The idea is to do reference counting as far as possible, 
and only fall back to full-on garbage collection when you hit cases that 
need it.

This way, it is fairly easy to write a well-behaved Python program whose 
memory usage will stay within reasonable bounds, even after running for a 
long time. Unlike Java, for example, which will happily chew up all the 
RAM on your system if you let it.

There is a downside, in that maintaining those reference counts reduces 
the concurrency when trying to do multithreading. The Python folks have a 
solution to that, which will take a bit of work to do correctly, but which 
is slowly going in.