[Python-Dev] Memory management in the AST parser & compiler

[Jeremy Hylton]

On 11/30/05, Neal Norwitz <nnorwitz at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/30/05, Thomas Lee <krumms at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Quick semi-related question: where are the marshal_* functions called?
> > They're all static in Python-ast.c and don't seem to be actually called
> > anywhere. Can we ditch them?
>
> I *think* they are not necessary.  My guess is that they were there
> for marshaling the AST to disk, though I'm not sure why we would want
> to do that.  It could have been there was the idea of how they would
> be marshalled to PyObjects and exported.
>
> Unless you hear otherwise from Jeremy, I would probably remove them.
>
> I can check your patch into the branch so others can get an idea and
> hopefully provide comments.

The intent was to share the AST objects between C and Python by coping
them.  I still think passing copies is better than sharing live
objects between Python and C, although the specific mechanism may be
different if the C objects are PyObjects.

Jeremy