Debug build without PYMALLOC

[Michael Hudson]

"Amaury" <amforgeot at yahoo.com> writes:

> Hello,
> 
> When debugging C extensions, I find the most difficult is to detect
> that an object is Py_DECREF'ed when it should not.
> And when you find yourself with an invalid object, it's a nightmare to
> find where the error occured!
> Normally tools like Purify are good to find this kind of memory
> errors, but they are of no use with python's own memory allocator.
> 
> That's why I recompiled python (on Windows) in debug mode after
> removing the WITH_PYMALLOC option.
> This worked very well: Purify warned about a "Free memory read", and
> it turned out that a custom sys.stdout was incorrectly DECREF'ed just
> before, which caused the crash.
> 
> The problem is that this python build (debug/without-pymalloc) is not
> compatible with extension modules built WITH_pymalloc. The DLL loader
> fails with a "missing _PyObject_DebugMalloc" error.
> Note that with release builds, extensions built with pymalloc are
> compatible with python.dll built without pymalloc.

Hmm, that makes sense but I hadn't thought of it before.  You could
also have recompiled the extensions, though.

> My workaround was to add the three functions (_PyObject_DebugMalloc,
> *Realloc and *Free) in obmalloc.c.
> Isn't there another way?
> Otherwise, should this be integrated in Python?

Possibly.  Post a bug report or maybe a patch to SF if you feel
strongly about it...

Cheers,
mwh

-- 
  If you don't use emacs, you're a pathetic, mewling, masochistic
  weakling and I can't be bothered to convert you.    -- Ron Echeverri