mechanism is no longer evil: it no longer plays dangerous games with
the type pointer or refcounts, and objects in extension modules can play
along too without needing to edit the core first.
Rewrote all the comments to explain this, and (I hope) give clear
guidance to extension authors who do want to play along. Documented
all the functions. Added more asserts (it may no longer be evil, but
it's still dangerous <0.9 wink>). Rearranged the generated code to
make it clearer, and to tolerate either the presence or absence of a
semicolon after the macros. Rewrote _PyTrash_destroy_chain() to call
tp_dealloc directly; it was doing a Py_DECREF again, and that has all
sorts of obscure distorting effects in non-release builds (Py_DECREF
was already called on the object!). Removed Christian's little "embedded
change log" comments -- that's what checkin messages are for, and since
it was impossible to correlate the comments with the code that changed,
I found them merely distracting.
Section 19.6 of RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1):
It is beyond the scope of a protocol specification to mandate
compliance with previous versions. HTTP/1.1 was deliberately
designed, however, to make supporting previous versions easy....
And we would expect HTTP/1.1 clients to:
- recognize the format of the Status-Line for HTTP/1.0 and 1.1
responses;
- understand any valid response in the format of HTTP/0.9, 1.0, or
1.1.
The changes to the code do handle response in the format of HTTP/0.9.
Some users may consider this a bug because all responses with a
sufficiently corrupted status line will look like an HTTP/0.9
response. These users can pass strict=1 to the HTTP constructors to
get a BadStatusLine exception instead.
While this is a new feature of sorts, it enhances the robustness of
the code (be tolerant in what you accept). Thus, I consider it a bug
fix candidate.
XXX strict needs to be documented.
binascii_crc32(): The previous patch forced this to return the same
result across platforms. This patch deals with that, on a 64-bit box,
the *entry* value may have "unexpected" bits in the high four bytes.
Bugfix candidate.
classdesc -- just use "..." with prose explaining the correspondence
between keyword args and instance attributes.
Document 'width' along with the other instance attributes.
Describe default values consistently.
Typo fixes.
\py@sigline macro will wrap the argument list so it will not extend into
the right margin.
Substantially based on a contribution from Dave Cole.
This addresses one of the comments in SF bug #574742.
binascii_crc32(): Make this return a signed 4-byte result across
platforms. The other way to make this platform-independent would be to
make it return an unsigned unbounded int, but the evidence suggests
other code out there treats it like a signed 4-byte int (e.g., existing
code writing the result with struct.pack "l" format).
Bugfix candidate.
This was mostly a matter of adding comments and light code rearrangement.
Upon untracking, gc_next is still set to NULL. It's a cheap way to
provoke memory faults if calling code is insane. It's also used in some
way by the trashcan mechanism.
object should now have a well-defined gc_refs value, with clear transitions
among gc_refs states. As a result, none of the visit_XYZ traversal
callbacks need to check IS_TRACKED() anymore, and those tests were removed.
(They were already looking for objects with specific gc_refs states, and
the gc_refs state of an untracked object can no longer match any other
gc_refs state by accident.)
Added more asserts.
I expect that the gc_next == NULL indicator for an untracked object is
now redundant and can also be removed, but I ran out of time for this.
in gc_refs, even at the cost of putting back a test+branch in
visit_decref.
The good news: since gc_refs became utterly tame then, it became
clear that another special value could be useful. The move_roots() and
move_root_reachable() passes have now been replaced by a single
move_unreachable() pass. Besides saving a pass over the generation, this
has a better effect: most of the time everything turns out to be
reachable, so we were breaking the generation list apart and moving it
into into the reachable list, one element at a time. Now the reachable
stuff stays in the generation list, and the unreachable stuff is moved
instead. This isn't quite as good as it sounds, since sometimes we
guess wrongly that a thing is unreachable, and have to move it back again.
Still, overall, it yields a significant (but not dramatic) boost in
collection speed.
1. You're not supposed to call this with a NULL argument, although the
docs could be clearer about that. The other visit_XYZ() functions
don't bother to check. This doesn't either now, although it does
assert non-NULL-ness now.
2. It doesn't matter whether the object is currently tracked, so don't
bother checking that either (if it isn't currently tracked, it may
have some nonsense value in gc_refs, but it doesn't hurt to
decrement gibberish, and it's cheaper to do so than to make everyone
test for trackedness).
It would be nice to get rid of the other tests on IS_TRACKED. Perhaps
trackedness should not be a matter of not being in any gc list, but
should be a matter of being in a new "untracked" gc list. This list
simply wouldn't be involved in the collection mechanism. A newly
created object would be put in the untracked list. Tracking would
simply unlink it and move it into the gen0 list. Untracking would do
the reverse. No test+branch needed then. visit_move() may be vulnerable
then, though, and I don't know how this would work with the trashcan.
"The regression" is actually due to that 2.2.1 had a bug that prevented
the regression (which isn't a regression at all) from showing up. "The
regression" is actually a glitch in cyclic gc that's been there forever.
As the generation being collected is analyzed, objects that can't be
collected (because, e.g., we find they're externally referenced, or
are in an unreachable cycle but have a __del__ method) are moved out
of the list of candidates. A tricksy scheme uses negative values of
gc_refs to mark such objects as being moved. However, the exact
negative value set at the start may become "more negative" over time
for objects not in the generation being collected, and the scheme was
checking for an exact match on the negative value originally assigned.
As a result, objects in generations older than the one being collected
could get scanned too, and yanked back into a younger generation. Doing
so doesn't lead to an error, but doesn't do any good, and can burn an
unbounded amount of time doing useless work.
A test case is simple (thanks to Kevin Jacobs for finding it!):
x = []
for i in xrange(200000):
x.append((1,))
Without the patch, this ends up scanning all of x on every gen0 collection,
scans all of x twice on every gen1 collection, and x gets yanked back into
gen1 on every gen0 collection. With the patch, once x gets to gen2, it's
never scanned again until another gen2 collection, and stays in gen2.
Bugfix candidate, although the code has changed enough that I think I'll
need to port it by hand. 2.2.1 also has a different bug that causes
bound method objects not to get tracked at all (so the test case doesn't
burn absurd amounts of time in 2.2.1, but *should* <wink>).
[1.3] Added documentation of the namespace URI for elements with no namespace.
[1.4] New property http://www.python.org/sax/properties/encoding.
[1.5] Support optional string interning in pyexpat.
Tim Peters