Comment by cpgxiii
5 days ago
> In practice CPython reliably calls it cuz it reference counts ... In a world where more people were using PyPy we could have pressure from that perspective to avoid leaning into it
A big part of the problem is that much of the power of the Python ecosystem comes specifically from extensions/bindings written in languages with manual (C) or RAII/ref-counted (C++, Rust) memory management, and having predictable Python-level cleanup behavior can be pretty necessary to making cleanup behavior in bound C/C++/Rust objects work. Breaking this behavior or causing too much of a performance hit is basically a non-starter for a lot of Python users, even if doing so would improve the performance of "pure" Python programs.
That cleanup can be explicit when needed by using context managers. Mixing resource handling with object lifetime is a bad design choice
> That cleanup can be explicit when needed by using context managers.
It certainly can be, but if a large part of the Python code you are writing involves native objects exposed through bindings then using context managers everywhere results in an incredible mess.
> Mixing resource handling with object lifetime is a bad design choice
It is a choice made successfully by a number of other high-performance languages/runtimes. Unfortunately for Python-the-language, so much of the utility of Python-the-ecosystem depends on components written in those languages (unlike, for example, JVM or CLR languages where the runtime is usually fast enough to require a fairly small portion of non-managed code).
Tell that to the C++ guys...