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Reference Counting

Each object stores a count of live references, incremented on copy and decremented on drop; the object is freed the moment the count reaches zero. Reclamation is deterministic but cycles keep each other alive unless broken by weak references.

Questions this Concept answers

Why does a driver take a reference on a kernel object it intends to keep a handle to?

jeremy Video

Reference Counting and Garbage Collection in Python Memory Management

Python manages memory automatically through the combination of reference counting (each object maintains a live count of variables/references pointing to it, and is freed once that count reaches zero…