On Aug 29, 11:26 am, "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Aug 28, 6:23 pm, "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Aug 28, 6:07 pm, mhammond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > The XPCOM objects exposed > > > by Python can be made a GCObject - but I'm not sure how we would > > > integrate the rest of the Python universe - eg, assuming we have an > > > arbitrary number of Python objects holding pointers to xpcom objects, > > > MMgc is conservative. So long as Python allocates memory to be scanned > > for pointers to MMgc allocations using MMgc's malloc wrapper, MMgc > > will find these pointers. > > I should have written "using an appropriate malloc wrapper". Ideally > only memory that might contain pointers to XPGC (heh) objects would be > allocated with the kContainsPointer MMgc flag. > > that may be hard to hook into C-Python. Is it?
I believe it is very hard to hook it into a built Python. It would be much easier to hook it in at build time but IIUC, it would also require that *all* Python extensions you wish to use are also rebuilt; any prebuilt Python extensions you can find on the web would be unusable. My gut tells me that this would be unacceptable to people using this platform with Python, but hopefully there are some lurkers here who can throw their 2c in. Another alternative I'm yet to investigate is that we hack on Python to offer the ability to hook a memory allocator in at runtime before Python is initialized. The downside of this approach is the in the short-term, we will not be able to work with a released version - it would need Python 2.6 or later. But even then, I have a concern regarding other languages - do we really want to raise the bar for entry into the xpcom world to being able to integrate with a garbage collection system? It seems our long terms goal is to get rid of xpcom in favour of the "one VM for all languages" approach, so while xpcom remains alive it should keep doing all it can to be inclusive of the languages able to be supported. Mark _______________________________________________ dev-tech-xpcom mailing list dev-tech-xpcom@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-xpcom
