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

Thu Dec 1 04:36:15 CET 2005

On 11/30/05, Neal Norwitz <nnorwitz at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/30/05, Thomas Lee <krumms at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Quick semi-related question: where are the marshal_* functions called?
> > They're all static in Python-ast.c and don't seem to be actually called
> > anywhere. Can we ditch them?
>> I *think* they are not necessary. My guess is that they were there
> for marshaling the AST to disk, though I'm not sure why we would want
> to do that. It could have been there was the idea of how they would
> be marshalled to PyObjects and exported.
>> Unless you hear otherwise from Jeremy, I would probably remove them.
>> I can check your patch into the branch so others can get an idea and
> hopefully provide comments.

The intent was to share the AST objects between C and Python by coping
them. I still think passing copies is better than sharing live
objects between Python and C, although the specific mechanism may be
different if the C objects are PyObjects.
Jeremy