[C++-sig] BPL and Py_Clear()

[Stefan Seefeld]

Niall Douglas wrote:

> How do you absolutely ensure a BPL wrapped object ceases to exist? In 
> other words, if python code has ten references to a BPL wrapped 
> object and I want that object to die immediately, therefore I would 
> have to ensure either (a) the BPL wrapped object becomes a zombie or 
> (b) each and every reference to that object is set to None.
> 
> The latter sounds more appealing. I'm assuming I'd have to walk some 
> table in Python?

That sounds quite unpythonic ! If I hold a reference to a python object,
I don't expect that to die in the middle of a program. Actually, I have
been debugging some code recently where I do some cleanup in a __del__
function of a global object, but the way python cleans up modules made
those calls fail, since system modules I tried to use were already set
to None. Fortunately that only happened at the end of a program, so
the issue was relatively easy to work around. (Yet I'm not sure whether
that can be considered a python bug.)

Regards,
		Stefan