Re: [Pyobjc-dev] ObjC GC with PyObjC?

[Ronald O. <ron...@ma...>]

On 4 Jun, 2009, at 0:57, Greg Ewing wrote:

> Ronald Oussoren wrote:
>
>> If I had the time, and funding, I'd much rather work on a port of
>> Python that uses the ObjC garbage collector instead of Python's  
>> native
>> memory management.
>
> While that might help PyObjC, I'd be very worried about
> what effect it might have on the performance of the rest
> of Python.
>
> Also I'm not sure I like the idea of having to use a
> special version of Python in order to be able to use
> ObjC.
>
> In general, I think that "create a special version of
> Python to make X work" is an anti-pattern. Think about
> what would happen if everyone did that, and then you
> wanted to use X and Y at the same time, where X and Y
> each required their own special Python version. It would
> be DLL hell on steroids.

I don't agree. There could be advantages for regular python as well,  
IMHO removing CPython's refcounting is a necessary first step for  
removing the GIL.  Removing the GIL would definitely be an advantage  
for general python code, especially because using multiple independent  
threads of execution is the only way to seriously improve performance  
on modern hardware because sadly enough the "wait a year and then my  
single-threaded code is twice as fast"-era is over. Multiprocessing is  
a cool hack, but isn't a real solution; I have a number of programs  
that use multiple threads and need shared memory to get fast enough  
communications (basicly because large objects get transferred between  
threads).

Ronald
>
> -- 
> Greg
>
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