[Python-Dev] Mixing memory management APIs (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal@lemburg.com
Wed, 30 Jan 2002 20:15:33 +0100

Neil Schemenauer wrote:

Michael Hudson wrote: > I agree we have too many preprocessor macros, but I don't think we can > have free == PyObjectDEL. If we don't then many extension modules will break. The example module Modules/xxmodule.c used to allocate using PyObjectNew and deallocate using free(). I believe there are many modules out there that do the same (or use PyMemDel, etc).

Breaking extensions is not a good idea. After all, these make Python so much fun to work with (since most of the work is usually already done ;-).

I do think that we should keep the differentiation between allocating raw memory buffers and space for Python objects.

Even though this is not currently used, it clarifies the code somewhat, e.g. to free memory allocated for a Python object you write PyObject_FREE(), for an raw buffer you write PyMem_FREE().

Who knows... perhaps we might want to handle Python object memory blocks differently in the future (e.g. build pymalloc support right into PyObject_NEW() and PyObject_DEL()) while leaving user space memory in the realm of malloc() et al.

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