Having been pointed to the actual paper[0] by Someone[1], the special bit (effectivly a local-refcount-is-nonzero flag) is in the same atomic word as the shared

Having been pointed to the actual paper[0] by Someone[1], the special bit (effectivly a local-refcount-is-nonzero flag) is in the same atomic word as the shared refcount, which I missed from the description of the python implementation. The shared refcount can go negative, but the (shared refcount,local-is-nonzero) tuple can never be (0,false) while the object is referenced. 0: https://sci-hub.se/https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3243176.3243195 https://sci-hub.se/https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3243176.32... 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28883218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28883218 (seriously, upvote this; it should be higher in the list of responses, since it actually properly refutes my original comment)