[Python-Dev] Memory leaks and uninitialized memory

[Tim Peters]

[Neal Norwitz]
> test_long_future:
>         there are memory leak problems with binary operations
>         which use longs and future division:
>
>             the following code leaks 32 bytes:
>
>                  >>> from __future__ import division
>                  >>> 5L / 3L

However,

    from __future__ import division
    while 1:
        5L / 3L

can run all day without memory size increasing, so this "leak" is probably
bogus (note that Python stores pointers to all sorts of malloc'ed memory
into file-static vrbls, and tiny "leaks" are often-- at considerable
cost --traced simply to that, e.g., a static Python string object constant
got dynamically initialized).

OTOH, if I change the tail end of test_long_future.py to

while 1:
    test_true_division()

it leaks like a sieve, so *something* is wrong there.  I'll track it down;
the routines that show up at the top of the stack traces appear to be
blameless:

>                malloc         [rtlib.o]
>                muladd1        [longobject.c:51]
>                PyLong_FromString [longobject.c:1027]
>                parsenumber    [compile.c:1096]