The platform requires 8-byte alignment for doubles, but the GC header
was 12 bytes and that threw off the natural alignment of the double
members of a subtype of complex. The fix puts the GC header into a
union with a double as the other member, to force no-looser-than
double alignment of GC headers. On boxes that require 8-byte alignment
for doubles, this may add pad bytes to the GC header accordingly; ditto
for platforms that *prefer* 8-byte alignment for doubles. On platforms
that don't care, it shouldn't change the memory layout (because the
size of the old GC header is certainly greater than the size of a double
on all platforms, so unioning with a double shouldn't change size or
alignment on such boxes).
This simplifies the rounding in _PyObject_VAR_SIZE, allows to restore the
pre-rounding calling sequence, and allows some nice little simplifications
in its callers. I'm still making it return a size_t, though.
As Guido suggested, this makes the new subclassing code substantially
simpler. But the mechanics of doing it w/ C macro semantics are a mess,
and _PyObject_VAR_SIZE has a new calling sequence now.
Question: The PyObject_NEW_VAR macro appears to be part of the public API.
Regardless of what it expands to, the notion that it has to round up the
memory it allocates is new, and extensions containing the old
PyObject_NEW_VAR macro expansion (which was embedded in the
PyObject_NEW_VAR expansion) won't do this rounding. But the rounding
isn't actually *needed* except for new-style instances with dict pointers
after a variable-length blob of embedded data. So my guess is that we do
not need to bump the API version for this (as the rounding isn't needed
for anything an extension can do unless it's recompiled anyway). What's
your guess?
pad memory to properly align the __dict__ pointer in all cases.
gcmodule.c/objimpl.h, _PyObject_GC_Malloc:
+ Added a "padding" argument so that this flavor of malloc can allocate
enough bytes for alignment padding (it can't know this is needed, but
its callers do).
typeobject.c, PyType_GenericAlloc:
+ Allocated enough bytes to align the __dict__ pointer.
+ Sped and simplified the round-up-to-PTRSIZE logic.
+ Added blank lines so I could parse the if/else blocks <0.7 wink>.
visit_finalizer_reachable since it's the same as visit_reachable.
Rename visit_reachable to visit_move. Objects can now have the GC type
flag set, reachable by tp_traverse and not be in a GC linked list. This
should make the collector more robust and easier to use by extension
module writers. Add memory management functions for container objects
(new, del, resize).
collector will be saved in gc.garbage. This is useful for debugging a
program that creates reference cycles.
- Fix else statements in gcmodule.c to conform to Python coding standards.
Guido van Rossum
Tim Peters
Neil Schemenauer
Jeremy Hylton
Vladimir Marangozov
Barry Warsaw
Fred Drake
Peter Schneider-Kamp