Python Software Foundation News: The 2022 Python Language Summit: Achieving immortality
What does it mean to achieve immortality? At the 2022 Python Language Summit, Eddie Elizondo, an engineer at Instagram, and Eric Snow, CPython core developer, set out to explain just that.
In Python, as is well known, everything is an object . This means that if you want to calculate even a simple sum, such as 194 + 3.14, the Python interpreter must create two objects: one object of type int representing the number 194, and another object of type float representing the type 3.14.
All objects in Python maintain a reference count : a running total of the number of active references to that object that currently exist in the program. If the reference count of an object drops to 0, the object is eventually destroyed (through a process known as garbage collection ). This process ensures that programmers writing Python don’t normally need to concern themselves with manually deleting an object when they’re done with it. Instead, memory is automatically freed up.
The need to keep reference counts for all objects (along with a few other mutable fields on all objects) means that there is currently no way of having a “truly immutable” object in Python.
