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.

BTW. We already have this in a way, there's Jython if you want to use  
Java, IronPython if you want to use .NET, .... and let's not forget  
Stackless Python.

There is a risk for fragmentation, but I don't think this is a very  
large risk because maintaining a patched version of Python is a  
relatively large amount  of work and it is therefore for most usecases  
way more convenient to not do that.

If I'd ever get around to creating a port of Python that uses the  
Python GC I'd try to keep it as close as possible to the real one, any  
deviation from CPython is a possibility for maintenance problems later  
on and would therefore need to have a big advantage to offset the  
maintenance cost.   Another thing that's worrisome is 3th-party  
extensions, one of the reasons to like Python is the large set of  
packages at PyPI, loosing access to those would seriously reduce the  
uptake of a patched version of python.

Ronald
>
> -- 
> Greg
>
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