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You're off in the weeds. A refcount can be incremented/decremented with a simple atomic compare-and-swap, and that's exactly what most refcounting systems do.

It's not free, but it's damn close to it.



If that is the case then why doesn't Python do it? I mean this as a real question; I genuinely don't know.


Because it was designed and written poorly, and its thread-safety issues extend far beyond refcounting.




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