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[C API] Remove _Py_NewReference() and _Py_ForgetReference() from the public C API #85161Description
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assignee = None
closed_at = <Date 2021-09-21.21:57:43.476>
created_at = <Date 2020-06-15.21:05:35.371>
labels = ['expert-C-API', '3.10']
title = '[C API] Remove _Py_NewReference() and _Py_ForgetReference() from the public C API'
updated_at = <Date 2021-09-21.21:57:43.475>
user = 'https://github.com/vstinner' bugs.python.org fields:
activity = <Date 2021-09-21.21:57:43.475>
actor = 'vstinner'
assignee = 'none'
closed = True
closed_date = <Date 2021-09-21.21:57:43.476>
closer = 'vstinner'
components = ['C API']
creation = <Date 2020-06-15.21:05:35.371>
creator = 'vstinner'
dependencies = []
files = []
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 40989
keywords = ['patch']
message_count = 11.0
messages = ['371597', '371600', '371604', '371654', '371656', '371671', '371711', '371715', '374883', '380890', '402377']
nosy_count = 2.0
nosy_names = ['scoder', 'vstinner']
pr_nums = ['20901', '20904', '20915', '21722']
priority = 'normal'
resolution = 'rejected'
stage = 'resolved'
status = 'closed'
superseder = None
type = None
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue40989'
versions = ['Python 3.10'] Activityvstinner commented on Jun 15, 2020 The _Py_NewReference() and _Py_ForgetReference() functions are tightly coupled to CPython internals.
_Py_NewReference() is only exposed because it used by the PyObject_INIT() macro which is the fast inlined flavor of PyObject_Init(). If we make PyObject_INIT() as alias to PyObject_Init(), as already done for the limited C API, _Py_NewReference() can be removed from the public C API (moved to the internal C API).
_Py_ForgetReference() function is only defined if Py_TRACE_REFS macro is defined. I propose to also removed it from the public C API (move it to the internal C API).
In the CPython code base, _Py_NewReference() is used:
- to implement the free list optimization
- in _PyBytes_Resize() and unicode_resize() (resize_compact() to be precise)
- by PyObject_CallFinalizerFromDealloc() to resurrect an object
These are corner cases which can be avoided in third party C extension modules. vstinner commented on Jun 15, 2020 Work on this issue started in Python 3.9 with the following change of bpo-39542:
commit f58bd7c
Author: Victor Stinner <[email protected]>
Date: Wed Feb 5 13:12:19 2020 +0100
bpo-39542: Make PyObject_INIT() opaque in limited C API (GH-18363)
In the limited C API, PyObject_INIT() and PyObject_INIT_VAR() are now
defined as aliases to PyObject_Init() and PyObject_InitVar() to make
their implementation opaque. It avoids to leak implementation details
in the limited C API.
Exclude the following functions from the limited C API, move them
from object.h to cpython/object.h:
* _Py_NewReference()
* _Py_ForgetReference()
* _PyTraceMalloc_NewReference()
* _Py_GetRefTotal()
vstinner commented on Jun 15, 2020 vstinner commented on Jun 16, 2020 vstinner commented on Jun 16, 2020 vstinner commented on Jun 16, 2020 scoder commented on Jun 17, 2020 To add to the list, Cython also calls _Py_NewReference() in its async generator code, which uses a free-list. That code was mostly copied from the CPython-internal implementation.
Other freelist implementations in Cython call PyObject_INIT() instead, so I guess calling _Py_NewReference() directly here isn't actually required and could be avoided. scoder commented on Jun 17, 2020 I looked into the freelists a bit more and (as always) it's not quite that simple. Calling _Py_NewReference() allows keeping the "ob_type" pointer in place, whereas PyObject_INIT() requires a blank object in order to set the type and properly ref-count heap types.
I think what that means is that there are at least two different cases for freelists: those that only keep the bare object memory alive (and can also support subtypes of the same size), and those that keep the (cleared) object alive, including its type. For the first, PyObject_INIT() works. For the latter, _Py_NewReference() seems the right helper function.
The advantage of keeping the object as it is is the much simpler freelist code in tp_dealloc(). All it needs to do is 1) clear the ref-counted object fields (if any) and 2) put it in the freelist. No other C-API interaction is needed. If we only want to keep the object memory, then we need C-API support in both tp_new() and tp_dealloc().
If _Py_NewReference() is removed/hidden, then it would be nice if there was a replacement for the use case of initialising an object from a freelist that already knows its type. vstinner commented on Aug 5, 2020 vstinner commented on Nov 13, 2020 vstinner commented on Sep 21, 2021 I still consider that these functions must be moved to the internal C API. But I failed to find time to design a *public* C API for that, or help projects using these functions to avoid it. I prefer to close the isseu for now.
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