[New-bugs-announce] [issue44897] Integrate trashcan mechanism into _Py_Dealloc

[Neil Schemenauer]

New submission from Neil Schemenauer <nas-python at arctrix.com>:

This is a WIP/proof-of-concept of doing away with Py_TRASHCAN_BEGIN and Py_TRASHCAN_END and instead integrating the functionality into _Py_Dealloc.  There are a few advantages:

- all container objects have the risk of overflowing the C stack if a long reference chain of them is created and then deallocated.  So, to be safe, the tp_dealloc methods for those objects should be protected from overflowing the stack.

- the Py_TRASHCAN_BEGIN and Py_TRASHCAN_END macros are hard to understand and a bit hard to use correctly.  Making the mechanism internal avoids confusion.  The code can be slightly simplified as well.

This proof-of-concept seems to pass tests but it will need some careful review.  The exact rules related to calling GC Track/Untrack are subtle and this changes things a bit.  I.e. tp_dealloc is called with GC objects already untracked.  For 3rd party extensions, they are calling PyObject_GC_UnTrack() and so I believe they should still work.  

The fact that PyObject_CallFinalizerFromDealloc() wants GC objects to definitely be tracked is a bit of a mystery to me (there is an assert to check that).  I changed the code to track objects if they are not already tracked but I'm not sure that's correct.

There could be a performance hit, due to the _PyType_IS_GC() test that was added to the _Py_Dealloc() function.  For non-GC objects, that's going to be a new branch and I'm worried it might hurt a bit.  OTOH, maybe it's just in the noise.  Profiling will need to be done.

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components: Interpreter Core
messages: 399433
nosy: nascheme
priority: normal
severity: normal
stage: patch review
status: open
title: Integrate trashcan mechanism into _Py_Dealloc
type: enhancement

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue44897>
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