> When did that happen?  I agree with Raymond.  The cyclic gc should just
> reclaim cycles.

People don't care about referential cycles, they care about freeing some
memory (if memory was available in infinite quantities nobody would care
about breaking cycles). That's how the API is used most of the time,
IMO. And that's why measurements of the usefulness of calling
gc.collect() are usually done in megabytes, not in number of
references :-).

So, while I agree that it sounds bizarre for the GC to do other
memory-related tasks, it's also quite practical. Besides, the GC already
has a heuristic for *when* to cleanup memory, and it makes sense to
reuse this heuristic for other memory cleanup tasks, rather than to
invent another heuristic or put the burden of the task on the user (who
usually won't even know what those freelists are).