>If GC is so good, why wouldn't Python just garbage collect everything, which they already did once and could trivially do I don't think python ever did pure m

>If GC is so good, why wouldn't Python just garbage collect everything, which they already did once and could trivially do I don't think python ever did pure mark-and-sweep ( cpython, at least, I'm sure jython and other alternate implementations have ). My understanding was that they did pure reference counting, and kludged on a sweep GC to do cycle breaking eventually, as manually breaking cycles in early versions of python was a pain point. A quick lookup seems to indicate python1 was pure reference counting, and they added the cycle breaking when they released python2.