On 11/23/18 5:15 AM, Armin Rigo wrote:
Also FWIW, my own 2 cents on the topic of changing the C API: let's
entirely drop ``PyObject *`` and instead use more opaque
handles---like a ``PyHandle`` that is defined as a pointer-sized C
type but is not actually directly a pointer.  The main difference this
would make is that the user of the API cannot dereference anything
from the opaque handle, nor directly compare handles with each other
to learn about object identity.  They would work exactly like Windows
handles or POSIX file descriptors.

Why would this be better than simply returning the pointer?  Sure, it prevents ever dereferencing the pointer and messing with the object, it is true.  So naughty people would be prevented from messing with the object directly instead of using the API as they should.  But my understanding is that the implementation would be slightly slower--there'd be all that looking up objects based on handles, and managing the handle namespace too.  I'm not convinced the nice-to-have of "you can't dereference the pointer anymore" is worth this runtime overhead.

Or maybe you have something pretty cheap in mind, e.g. "handle = pointer ^ 49"?  Or even "handle = pointer ^ (random odd number picked at startup)" to punish the extra-naughty?



/arry