[Python-Dev] Quick-and-dirty weak references

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Vladimir Marangozov wrote:
> 
> M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
> > I have checked the ref counts pretty thoroughly, but before
> > going public I would like the Python-Dev crowd to run some
> > tests as well: after all, the point is for the weak references
> > to be weak and that's sometimes a bit hard to check.
> 
> It's even harder to implement them without side effects. I used
> the same hack for the __heirs__ class attribute some time ago.
> But I knew that a parent class cannot be garbage collected before
> all of its descendants. That allowed me to keep weak refs in
> the parent class, and preserve the existing strong refs in the
> subclasses. On every dealloc of a subclass, the corresponding
> weak ref in the parent class' __heirs__ is removed.
> 
> In your case, the lifetime of the objects cannot be predicted,
> so implementing weak refs by messing with refcounts or checking
> mem pointers is a dead end.

> I don't know whether this is the
> case with mxProxy as I just browsed the code quickly, but here's
> a scenario where your scheme (or implementation) is not working:
> 
> >>> from Proxy import WeakProxy
> >>> o = []
> >>> p = WeakProxy(o)
> >>> d = WeakProxy(o)
> >>> p
> <WeakProxy object at 20260138>
> >>> d
> <WeakProxy object at 20261328>
> >>> print p
> []
> >>> print d
> []
> >>> del o
> >>> p
> <WeakProxy object at 20260138>
> >>> d
> <WeakProxy object at 20261328>
> >>> print p
> Illegal instruction (core dumped)

Could you tell me where the core dump originates ? Also, it would
help to compile the package with the -DMAL_DEBUG switch turned
on (edit Setup) and then run the same things using 'python -d'.
The package will then print a pretty complete list of things it
is doing to mxProxy.log, which would help track down errors like
these.

BTW, I get:
>>> print p

Traceback (innermost last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
mxProxy.LostReferenceError: object already garbage collected
>>>

[Don't know why the print statement prints an empty line, though.]

Thanks for trying it,
-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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