I don't like the conflating of implementations and languages, since it removes legitimacy of the alternate implementations. Please specify the runtimes.<p>> Whenever an object’s reference count reaches zero, Python immediately frees it, returning its memory to the operating system<p>CPython has its own allocator that steals memory into locally owned pools, so freeing memory won't normally actually <i>free</i> the memory. Plus, there's no guarantee the OS would get it back anyway.