First Steps into Memory Management in Python

Automated excerpt

The garbage collector solves a problem that reference counting can’t: circular references. When two objects point to each other, their counts never reach zero. x. append(y) # list B = 2 (y, A): now A -> B -> A, a cycle That’s not as deep as I went, but it’s enough to get some insights: you don’t have full control over freed memory, because the allocator decides what goes back to the OS, but you can control how long a reference lives. Then it’s freed as soon as that call returns.

Selected automatically from source text; not independently written or fact-checked. Read the original for full context.