[Python-Dev] PEP 384 status (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Sun Sep 12 22:26:54 CEST 2010

That said, looking at the PEP, I was wondering whether fields such as obtype, obrefcnt, obsize have to be directly accessible, rather than through a macro-turned-into-a-function such as PyREFCNT().

That they are macros still is primarily for performance reasons. For ob_type, that may be questionable; for Py_INCREF, I hope you agree that it's really desirable for it to be inline.

However, more importantly, user-defined objects need to start with the standard object header. I really see no way to let extensions define types without them also being able to access their own struct fields, which in turn requires compile-time (ABI) knowledge of PyObject_HEAD.

This is also the reason why Py_TRACE_REFS can't be supported in the ABI: it increases sizeof(PyObject), and thus shifts all user fields in the object.

I actually do have a priori knowledge of what might happen in the future :-): If we were to change the layout of the object header in a significant way, then the majority of extension modules would break - not only on the binary level, but also on the source level. So any change to this likely justifies calling it Python 4. (I would be that even Python 4 keeps that structure)

Regards, Martin

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