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by bbernard 3486 days ago
Check out this SO thread: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2017381/is-it-possible-to....

There are indeed many interpretations of what a memory leak is in Python.

In C/C++, you can forget to free memory, thus causing memory leaks. For example, you may call malloc(), but forget to call free(). In Python or Java, you can't do that; you don't need to explicitly "free" objects, as there's a GC.

Sure, you could leave rogue Python or Java objects in memory, but in my mind this isn't a "leak" in the same sense as a leak in C/C++. The Python interpreter (which is written in C) or some C extension may themselves cause real leaks, though.

I'm the author of the post. Maybe my reasoning was not explained clearly enough.