Message5896

Jython does not implement reference counting, and in general it never will.

I should note that it is certainly possible to simulate in app code, perhaps through a  canonical mapping of objects that are to be ref counted to atomic counters, which can then be incremented/decremented as desired.

We will need to do something similar once we decide to implement the C Extension API, following similar experience in PyPy. But this would be restricted to objects managed with respect to the C API.