[cpgxiii]

> 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.

[mattip]

That cleanup can be explicit when needed by using context managers. Mixing resource handling with object lifetime is a bad design choice

[cpgxiii]

> 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).

[1718627440]

Tell that to the C++ guys...