[Python-Dev] PEP 454 - tracemalloc - accepted

[Victor Stinner]

2013/11/21 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com>:
> Huzzah! Thanks to you both for getting this ready for inclusion :)

I now hope that someone will use it :-)


By the way, collections.namedtuple has a private _source attribute.
This attributes uses something like 676.2 kB in the Python test suite,
it the 5th biggest user of memory.

Woud you mind if I simply remove it?

I'm asking because this *private* attribute is documented, which is
surprising for something private. I don't understand the use case. Is
it to debug the implementation of the namedtuple? Or I imagined a
different usecase: dump the _source into a file to speedup the startup
time. But this optimization is not used in CPython whereas we care of
the startup time.

Can maybe Raymond explain the use case for this attribute?

If there is a real use case, I would prefer a real function to get the
source code of a function defining a new namedtuple type.

I already opened an issue for that:
http://bugs.python.org/issue19640

--

The implementation of namedtuple constructor ("factory" ?) looks
inefficient. Why do we need to build source code to then parse the
code source? Why not having a base namedtuple class and then inherit
from this class? It may reduce the memory footprint, allow to check if
a type is namedtuple, etc.

There are two different concerns, I prefer to only focus on the
removal of the _source attribute. But it's also to say the the _source
attribute is very specific to the current (inefficient?) implement of
the namedtuple constructor.

Victor