[Python-Dev] Memory leak tracking

[Barry A. Warsaw]

Folks, I've been doing a fair bit of Purify-cation on the Python
source tree.  Things are looking pretty good in general, but I have a
question for you all.

When I compile out gc, I get more leaks in the core, namely in
exceptions.c.   Turning on gc clears all of these up; e.g. all the
memory gets freed eventually.  My suspicion therefore is that there
are a number of cycles created during the initialization of the
built-in exceptions.

How important is it to fix these problems when gc is disabled?  It's
not a lot of memory (like <5000 bytes or so for running one of the
regr tests) and it'll take some time to track them down and figure out
what the right fix is.  Given everything all the other more
interesting work to do, it doesn't seem worth it.  So far we haven't
seen any showstopping gc bugs reported yet, so I'm hopeful it'll
remain enabled by default in 2.0.

Please let me know what you think.  If the concensus is to fix them, I
keep working on them.  I do still plan on looking at the few memory
problems still left even with gc turned on.

-Barry