> Let's try reductio ad adsurdum on that one. Suppose that instead of > filling in a malloced chunk of memory, you had stored those gizmoids in > local variables foo0, foo1, foo2, etc. Using your reasoning: we can't > ever return from our function (which frees up the stack memory > containing foo0 etc) because we don't know when garbage collector will > free foo0 etc. Avoiding that problem would require a Python/C API > function with a name like Py_AwaitGarbageCollection() ... but there > isn't one.
There are 2 memory components that make up a Python object. First, there is the object in memory itself. Secondly, there is the 4 bytes or so that hold the address to the object in memory. (the 'pointer') I think what I hear you saying is that garbage collection has to automagically take care of my second component above as well. So can I assume you are also saying our original malloc'd pointer to Python objects will be take care of as well as the objects? (Hence, no free(my_array) necessary?) (Only Py_INCREFs and Py_DECREFs need apply?) Chris -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
