3 ms·

The context of the copy-on-write win was the bytecode for modules. I don't know that you'd have anybody meddling with the reference counts for that...but I hav

• rayiner 15y ago
  Bytecode is stored in function objects which IIRC are reference-counted.
  • lobster_johnson 15y ago
    Aside from ad-hoc classes (defined within the scope of a function, say), does it ever make sense to garbage-collect a module or a class? Say you do "import smtplib" in your main file. Now that module is imported -- forever. I don't know the internals of Python well enough, but I bet that the module reference has strong references to its contents, so that even if nobody is actually calling anything in smtplib, it will be there in case someone does. The same should be true about modules importing other modules; they stay visible at the scope-level, so they are permanently loaded. So for those cases it would make sense to keep them separate from global garbage collection. I'm pretty sure that the method tables of all the classes in the system take up considerable space, probably in the order of megabytes for many apps.