Any cross-interpreter mechanism for passing objects between interpreters must be very careful to respect isolation, even when the object is effectively immutable (e.g. int, str). Here this especially relates to when an interpreter sends one of its objects, and then is destroyed while the inter-interpreter machinery (e.g. queue) still holds a reference to the object.
When I added interpreters.Queue, I dealt with that case (using an atexit hook) by silently removing all items from the queue that were added by the finalizing interpreter.
Later, while working on concurrent.futures.InterpreterPoolExecutor (gh-116430), I noticed it was somewhat surprising when items were silently removed from the queue when the originating interpreter was destroyed. (See my comment on that PR.)
It took me a little while to realize what was going on. I expect that users, which much less context than I have, would experience the same pain.
My approach, here, to improving the situation is to give users three options:
1. return a singleton (interpreters.queues.UNBOUND) from Queue.get() in place of each removed item
2. raise an exception (interpreters.queues.ItemInterpreterDestroyed) from Queue.get() in place of each removed item
3. existing behavior: silently remove each item (i.e. Queue.get() skips each one)
The default will now be (1), but users can still explicitly opt in any of them, including to the silent removal behavior.
The behavior for each item may be set with the corresponding Queue.put() call. and a queue-wide default may be set when the queue is created. (This is the same as I did for "synconly".)
This is similar to the situation with threading._DummyThread. The methods (incl. __del__()) of interpreters.Interpreter objects must be careful with interpreters not created by interpreters.create(). The simplest thing to start with is to disable any method that modifies or runs in the interpreter. As part of this, the runtime keeps track of where an interpreter was created. We also handle interpreter "refcounts" properly.
I had meant to switch everything to InterpreterError when I added it a while back. At the time I missed a few key spots.
As part of this, I've added print-the-exception to _PyXI_InitTypes() and fixed an error case in `_PyStaticType_InitBuiltin().
This brings the code under test.support.interpreters, and the corresponding extension modules, in line with recent updates to PEP 734.
(Note: PEP 734 has not been accepted at this time. However, we are using an internal copy of the implementation in the test suite to exercise the existing subinterpreters feature.)
We need the TracebackException of uncaught exceptions for a single purpose: the error display. Thus we only need to pass the formatted error display between interpreters. Passing a pickled TracebackException is overkill.
When an exception is uncaught in Interpreter.exec_sync(), it helps to show that exception's error display if uncaught in the calling interpreter. We do so here by generating a TracebackException in the subinterpreter and passing it between interpreters using pickle.
Eric Snow