[Cython] CEP1000: Native dispatch through callables

[Dag Sverre Seljebotn]

On 04/17/2012 02:40 PM, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 12:54 PM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn
> <d.s.seljebotn at astro.uio.no>  wrote:
>> I don't believe doing interning right without a common dependency .so is all
>> that easy. I'd love to see a concrete spec for it (e.g., if you use Python
>> bytes in a dict in sys.modules['_nativecall'], the bytes objects could be
>> deallocated before callables containing the interned string -- unless you
>> Py_INCREF once too many, but then valgrind complains -- and so on).
>
> I don't understand. A C-callable object would hold a reference to each
> interned string it contains, just like any other Python data structure
> does. When the C-callable object is deallocated, then it drops this
> reference, and if it there are no other live C-callable objects that
> use the same signature, and there are no callers that are statically
> caching the signature, then it will drop out of the intern table.
> Otherwise it doesn't.

Thanks!, I'm just being dense.

In fact I was the one who first proposed just storing interned 
PyBytesObject* way back in the start of the thread, but it met 
opposition in favour of an interned char* or an allocated "string id"; 
perhaps that's why I shut the possibility out of my mind.

Would we store just PyBytesObject* or a char* in addition? Is bytes a 
vararg object or does it wrap a char*? If the former I think we should 
just store the PyBytesObject*.

DS