Add a paragraph about obmalloc turning up bugs in extension modules

Mention the new ports
This commit is contained in:
Andrew M. Kuchling 2001-03-23 03:52:46 +00:00
parent fe0d79fbeb
commit ac1abe0bfe
1 changed files with 21 additions and 2 deletions

View File

@ -751,8 +751,24 @@ memory overhead. The allocator uses C's \function{malloc()} function
to get large pools of memory, and then fulfills smaller memory
requests from these pools. It can be enabled by providing the
\longprogramopt{with-pymalloc} option to the \program{configure} script; see
\file{Objects/obmalloc.c} for the implementation details.
Contributed by Vladimir Marangozov.
\file{Objects/obmalloc.c} for the implementation details.
Authors of C extension modules should test their code with the object
allocator enabled, because some incorrect code may break, causing core
dumps at runtime. There are a bunch of memory allocation functions in
Python's C API that have previously been just aliases for the C
library's \function{malloc()} and \function{free()}, meaning that if
you accidentally called mismatched functions, the error wouldn't be
noticeable. When the object allocator is enabled, these functions
aren't aliases of \function{malloc()} and \function{free()} any more,
and calling the wrong function to free memory will get you a core
dump. For example, if memory was allocated using
\function{PyMem_New()}, it has to be freed using
\function{PyMem_Del()}, not \function{free()}. A few modules included
with Python fell afoul of this and had to be fixed; doubtless there
are more third-party modules that will have the same problem.
The object allocator was contributed by Vladimir Marangozov.
\item The speed of line-oriented file I/O has been improved because
people often complain about its lack of speed, and because it's often
@ -827,6 +843,9 @@ code.
\item The size of the Unicode character database was shrunk by another
340K thanks to Fredrik Lundh.
\item Some new ports were contributed: MacOS X (by Steven Majewski),
Cygwin (by Jason Tishler); RISCOS (by Dietmar Schwertberger).
\end{itemize}
And there's the usual list of minor bugfixes, minor memory leaks,