On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 3:56 PM Neil Schemenauer <nas-python@arctrix.com> wrote:
Right. I wonder though, could we avoid allocating the Python frame object until we actually need it? Two situations when you need a heap allocated frame come to mind immediately: generators that are suspended and frames as part of a traceback. I guess sys._getframe() is another. Any more?
I've been thinking about that as well... I think in some ways the easy part of this is actually the easy part of this is the reification of the frame it's self. You can have a PyFrameObject which is just declared on the stack and add a new field to it which captures the address of the PyFrameObject* f (e.g. PyFrameObject **f_stackaddr). When you need to move to aheap allocated one you copy everything over as you say and update *f_stackaddr to point at the new heap address. It seems a little bit annoying with the various levels of indirection from the frame getting created in PyEval_EvalCodeEx and flowing down into _PyEval_EvalFrameDefault - so there may need to be some breakage there for certain low-level tools. I'm also a little bit worried about things which go looking at PyThreadState and might make nasty assumptions about the frames already being heap allocated. FYI IronPython does support sys._getframe(), you just need to run it with a special flag (and there are various levels - e.g. -X:Frames and -X:FullFrames, the latter which guarantees your locals are in the frame too). IronPython is more challenged here in that it always generates "safe" code from a CLR perspective and tracking the address of stack-allocated frame objects is therefore challenging (although maybe more possible now then before with various C# ref improvements). I'm not sure exactly how much this approach would get though... It seems like the frame caches are pretty effective, and a lot of the cost of them is initializing them / decref'ing the things which are still alive in them. But it doesn't seem a like a super complicated change to try out... It's actually something I'd at least like to try prototyping at some point.