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

[Neal Norwitz]

On 11/15/05, Jeremy Hylton <jeremy at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> Thanks for the message.  I was going to suggest the same thing.  I
> think it's primarily a question of how to add an arena layer.  The AST
> phase has a mixture of malloc/free and Python object allocation.  It
> should be straightforward to change the malloc/free code to use an
> arena API.  We'd probably need a separate mechanism to associate a set
> of PyObject* with the arena and have those DECREFed.

Well good.  It seems we all agree there is a problem and on the
general solution.  I haven't thought about Brett's idea to see if it
could work or not.  It would be great if we had someone start working
to improve the situation.  It could well be that we live with the
current code for 2.5, but it would be great to use arenas for 2.6 at
least.

Niko, Marek, how would you like to lose your lurker status? ;-)

n