[zahlman]

You'd presumably need to do something involving weakrefs, since it would be really bad if you told Python that the elements can be GCd at all (never mind whether it can be done all at once) but someone else had a reference.

Or completely rearchitect the language to have a model of automatic (in the C sense) allocation. I can't see that ever happening.

[kstrauser]

I don't think either of those are true. I'm not arguing against cleaning up objects during the normal runtime. What I'd like is something that would avoid GC'ing objects one-at-a-time at program shutdown.

I've had cases where it took Python like 30 seconds to exit after I'd slurped a large CSV with a zillion rows into RAM. At that time, I'd dreamed of a way to tell Python not to bother free()ing any of that, just exit() and let Linux unmap RAM all at once. If you think about it, there probably aren't that many resources you actually care about individually freeing on exit. I'm certain somewill will prove me wrong, but at a first pass, objects that don't define __del__ or __exit__ probably don't care how you destroy them.

[zahlman]

Ah.

I imagine the problem is that `__del__` could be monkeypatched, so Python doesn't strictly know what needs custom finalization until that moment.

But if you have a concrete proposal, it's likely worth shopping around at https://discuss.python.org/c/ideas/6 or https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/ .

[kstrauser]

I might do that. It’s nothing I’ve thought about in depth, just an occasionally recurring idea that bugs me every now and then.