[Python-Dev] new failing test -- test_compiler (original) (raw)

Jeremy Hylton jhylton at gmail.com
Sat Aug 7 21:29:19 CEST 2004

I added a test for the compiler package, because I realized it would easily fall out of date if the language changed (say, decorators were added) and the compiler package wasn't updated. I added a test with a resource, so it would only fail if you run regrtest.py -u all. I think that's a little lame, but better than letting us get into beta without getting the compiler package fixed.

At any rate, the test become somewhat more interesting than I expected because it fails in an unexpected way:

Fatal Python error: deletion of interned string failed Aborted (core dumped)

My best guess is that this is a stack overflow. In particular, gdb shows that the failure is 388 stack levels deep. The compiler package has very deep function calls, because it uses recursion to traverse abstract syntax trees. (I know, I know, we should just rewrite the compiler to use iterator instead of recursion .) Inside one of those deeply nested calls, it triggers GC which attempts to free a deeply nested tree that is now garbage. I think that's where it blows up. If anyone has suggestions for debugging, I'm all ears.

Jeremy

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