[Python-Dev] Memory management in the AST parser & compiler

Fri Nov 18 02:19:45 CET 2005

On Nov 17, 2005, at 5:00 PM, Thomas Lee wrote:
> Portability may also be an issue to take into consideration:

Of course -- but so is anno domini... the eskimo.com FAQ is (C) 1995, 
and the neohapsis.com page just points to the eskimo.com one:
> http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/q7.32.html
> http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/postfix/2001-05/1305.html

In 2006, I'm not sure the need to avoid alloca is anywhere as 
strong. Sure, it could be wrapped into a LOCALLOC macro (with a 
companion LOCFREE one), the macro expanding to alloca/nothing on 
systems which do have alloca and to malloc/free elsewhere -- this 
would keep the sources just as cluttered, but still speed things up 
where feasible. E.g., on my iBook, a silly benchmark just freeing 
and allocating 80,000 hunks of 1000 bytes takes 13ms with alloca, 57 
without...
Alex