[Python-Dev] Deprecate invalid ctypes call protection on Windows (original) (raw)

Victor Stinner victor.stinner at gmail.com
Tue May 23 15:12:32 EDT 2017

2017-05-22 13:17 GMT-05:00 Steve Dower <steve.dower at python.org>:

Once the special protection is removed, most of these cases will become OSError due to the general protection against segmentation faults.

It didn't know that ctypes on Windows had a special protection against programming errors. I'm not aware of such protection Linux. If you call a function with the wrong number of arguments, it's likely to crash or return random data.

I guess that the point is to help debugging. But since Python 3.6, faulthandler now registers a Windows exception handler and so it able to dump the Python traceback on any Windows exception: https://docs.python.org/dev/library/faulthandler.html#faulthandler.enable

So I think that it's now fine to remove the ctypes protection. Just advice (remind? ;-)) users to enable faulthandler: python3 -X faulthandler, or call faulthandler.enable(). (You might want to use a log file for that on Windows, depends on the use case.)

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