Issue 31983: Officially add Py_SETREF and Py_XSETREF (original) (raw)

This issue has been migrated to GitHub: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/76164

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Created on 2017-11-08 16:24 by serhiy.storchaka, last changed 2022-04-11 14:58 by admin. This issue is now closed.

Messages (5)
msg305878 - (view)	Author: Serhiy Storchaka (serhiy.storchaka) *	Date: 2017-11-08 16:24
Private macros Py_SETREF and Py_XSETREF were introduced in 3.6 and backported to all maintained versions for fixing bugs (see and ). They are helpful and used not only for the primary purpose, but also for simplifying the code. Their names don't start from underscore because I planned to make them public and didn't want massive renaming and backporting conflicts. Now I think it is a time to add them officially to the stable C API.
msg305888 - (view)	Author: Stefan Krah (skrah) *	Date: 2017-11-08 18:06
Just adding +1.
msg305889 - (view)	Author: Serhiy Storchaka (serhiy.storchaka) *	Date: 2017-11-08 18:48
Does anyone want to propose a patch? This is mainly a documentation issue. Needed documenting Py_SETREF and Py_XSETREF in Doc/c-api/refcounting.rst, adding entries in Doc/whatsnew/3.7.rst, and "Misc/NEWS.d/next/C API/", and updating a guard in Include/object.h.
msg306284 - (view)	Author: Raymond Hettinger (rhettinger) *	Date: 2017-11-15 16:37
Adding my -1. My experience was that these macros impaired my ability to maintain the code and interfered with useful patterns like delaying all decrefs until an object was in a consistent state. While I know that name was bikeshedded quite a bit, the outcome is rather unintuitive: https://twitter.com/raymondh/status/930535938459025408
msg309033 - (view)	Author: Serhiy Storchaka (serhiy.storchaka) *	Date: 2017-12-25 09:30
Since there are objections, it is too early to make this a public C API.