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Reference Counting #2194
Description
Describe the Bug
For some languages , we have references mentioned above of class/function with the number of references that the object is used.
But for Python, I can't find it. This could be a good feature for Python.
microsoft/pylance-release#6660
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(Only applicable for extension issues) IDE Information
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Activity
yangdanny97 commentedon Jan 22, 2026
This seems like a neat feeature!
If we did this, we would need to make sure it doesn't block other features from working while it's being calculated in the background. Find-references is expensive and won't work until we finish indexing the codebase. The current implementation is designed to run in the background, but I worry about performance if we reuse it directly & proactively do find-references for all functions in your currently open file.
Tracking references in the state & updating it during rechecks might make lookups faster, but it would also increase baseline memory usage (unclear by how much) so there's a tradeoff.
yangdanny97 commentedon Mar 17, 2026
Maybe a cheaper thing to start with could be doing this only for functions/classes marked
@deprecated?yangdanny97 commentedon Mar 18, 2026
@samwgoldman mentioned that we can retain the references information as we index the codebase, and we can skip showing these codelenses while indexing is happening. so maybe worth attempting
yinkaaiwu commentedon Jun 17, 2026
Nice! I've been looking for this feature. When will it be available in the VSCode extension?
asukaminato0721 commentedon Jun 24, 2026
#claim
github-actions commentedon Jun 24, 2026
@asukaminato0721 you've claimed this issue — it's now assigned to you. Thanks for picking it up! 🎉
github-actions commentedon Oct 31, 2026