[Python-Dev] Activating pymalloc

2002年3月15日 14:32:37 -0500

> Heh. That gets me back to where I landed many months ago: because
> people *do* rely on what the code has actually done, and what the
> code has actually done is expand to platform "malloc" and "free",
> the only truly safe way to start using pymalloc is to map all the
> existing macros to malloc and free directly, and change the core to
> use a new API (which motivated extension authors would be welcome to
> use too, provided they agreed to believe the new API's docs <wink>).
> I expect a much simpler API would be possible if it were YAGNI-free
> -- even the very old distinction between "plain memory" and "object
> memory" has proved to be a YAGNI (worse, is actively getting in the
> way now).

Of course, we'd still have several sets of macros, because of the need
to be able to say different things: allocate and initialize an object,
initialize an object, deinitialize an object and free its memory,
deinitialize an object without freeing its memory; and the GC
variations of all these; and macros that take type arguments used for
convenient casting. (Initializing and deinitializing an object are
things like setting the refcount to 1 and initializing the type
pointer, but various debugging modes add functionalities like counting
allocations and linking all objects together in a doubly-linked list.)
> > Tim, do you think you're ready to make a specific proposal?
>> No, and until we make up our minds about whether to start over, it's
> really two or three different proposals.

Assuming we're ready to start over, I'd like to see a minimal proposal
so we can discuss something concrete.
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)