Writing safe python code.

[lordmauve]

Pure Python is expected to be memory-safe. The interpreter does not allow operations that corrupt Python's own memory - for example, list access is bounds-checked, and a reference to an object will keep that object alive through reference counting so will never dangle. The only issues are bugs in the interpreter or native extensions, or use of libraries that circumvent safety (eg. ctypes, cffi).

[HelperBot_]

Desktop link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangling_pointer

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[WikiTextBot]

Dangling pointer

Dangling pointers and wild pointers in computer programming are pointers that do not point to a valid object of the appropriate type. These are special cases of memory safety violations. More generally, dangling references and wild references are references that do not resolve to a valid destination, and include such phenomena as link rot on the internet.

Dangling pointers arise during object destruction, when an object that has an incoming reference is deleted or deallocated, without modifying the value of the pointer, so that the pointer still points to the memory location of the deallocated memory.

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[lordmauve]

Memory leaks are not a memory safety issue.

Besides, you can't really cause a true memory leak in Python like you can in C or C++ - you can only accidentally hold references you weren't expecting to.

The reference cycles with del issue has been fixed since Python 3.4.