[Nick Maclaren]
> I Have been thinking about software floating point, and there are
> some aspects of Python and decimal that puzzle me. Basically, they
> are things that are wanted for this sort of thing and seem to be
> done in very contorted ways, so I may have missed something.
>
> Firstly, can Python C code assume no COMPACTING garbage collector,
> or should it allow for things shifting under its feet?
CPython never relocates objects. The address of a Python object is
fixed from birth to death.
> Secondly, is there any documentation on the constraints and necessary
> ritual when allocating chunks of raw data and/or types of variable
> size? Decimal avoids the latter.
Note that because CPython never relocates objects, it's impossible to
allocate "in one gulp" an object of a mutable type with a dynamically
size-varying member. So, e.g., list objects have a fixed-size object
header (which never moves), while the list "guts" are separately
allocated; OTOH, tuples are immutable, so can (& do) allocate all the
space they need in one gulp.
See the Python/C API Reference Manual, esp. "Allocating Objects on the
Heap", "Supporting Cyclic Garbage Collection", and "Memory
Management".
> Thirdly, I can't find an efficient way for object-mangling code to
> access class data and/or have some raw data attached to a class (as
> distinct from an instance).
Don't know what "raw data" might mean here. Any Python object can be
bound to any attribute of a class. In Python, e.g.,
class MyClass:
mydata = ['xyz', 12]
def method(self):
MyClass.mydata.append(-1)
# or, more inheritance-friendly
self.__class__.mydata.append(-1)
This is substantially more long-winded in C.
> Fourthly, can I assume that no instance of a class will remain active
> AFTER the class disappears? This would mean that it could use a
> pointer to class-level raw data.
It would be an error to free the memory for a class if the class is
reachable. So long as an instance I of a class C is reachable, C is
also reachable (at least via I.__class__) so C _must_ not disappear.
C disappears only if it becomes unreachable, and one of the garbage
collection mechanisms then gets around to freeing its memory. All gc
mechanisms in CPython rely on accurate reference counts.
> I can explain why all of those are the 'right' way to approach the
> problem, at an abstract level, but it is quite possible that Python
> does not support the abstract model of class implementation that I
> am thinking of.
Since we don't know what you're thinking of, you're on your own there ;-)
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