[Numpy-discussion] Bug in resize method?

[Anne Archibald]

On 29/08/2007, Timothy Hochberg <tim.hochberg at ieee.org> wrote:

> The main inconsistency I see above is that resize appears to only require
> ownership of the data if in fact the number of items changes. I don't think
> that's actually a bug, but I don't like it much; I would prefer that resize
> be strict and always require ownership. However, I'm fairly certain that
> there are people that prefer "friendliness" over consistency, so I wouldn't
> be surprised to get some pushback on changing that.

It seems to me like inplace resize is a problem, no matter how you
implement it --- is there any way to verify that no view exists of a
given array? (refcounts won't do it since there are other, non-view
ways to increase the refcount of an array.) If there's a view of an
array, you resize() it in place, and realloc() moves the data, the
views now point to bogus memory: you can cause the python interpreter
to segfault by addressing their contents. I really can't see any way
around this; why not remove inplace resize() (or make it raise
exceptions if the size has to change) and allow only the function
resize()?

Anne