Question

Is there a way to remove all references to an object at once? I know that’s unpythonic, so I’ll explain what I’m trying to do and maybe someone knows a better way.

I’m writing an object-oriented wrapper around a SWIG wrapper for a C library. When a proxy for one of the C objects is deleted, it also deletes child objects (directly in C). I’d like that to also trigger deletion of their proxy objects in Python. Otherwise I run into a situation where there are Python objects carrying around invalid pointers which will segfault if they’re accessed.

It looks sort of like this:

class Parent(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.ptr = swig.createParent()
    def __del__(self):
        swig.deleteParent(self.ptr) # also deletes children

class Child(object):
    def __init__(self, parent):
        self.ptr = swig.createChild(parent)
    def __del__(self):
        swig.deleteChild(self.ptr)

And this is the situation I’m worried about:

p = Parent()
c = Child(parent)
del p
# accessing c.ptr now would be bad right?

Answer 1

If I understand you correctly, you are wrapping some C code, and the C code has a destructor that can be called. After that, any attempt to use the pointer to the C code object causes a fatal crash.

I am not sure of your exact situation, so I am going to give you two alternate answers.

0) If the C object can be freed for some reason out of your control, and you need to make sure your Python wrapper code doesn’t crash, you need to make the Python wrapper know whether the C object is available or not. Make your Python object handle the pointer no longer being valid. You could raise a Python exception, return an error code, or just have the method functions become no-op functions, depending on what you are doing. The C object going away doesn’t free the Python object, so you can handle this cleanly.

1) If the C object is only freed when the Python object is freed, you don’t have a problem. Python references, when they go out of scope or you call del() on them, do not free the Python object; they just decrement the reference count on that object. When the reference count goes to zero, then the object is freed and your __del__() method function can call into the C code to free the C object.

You can watch how it works by running this code:

class DelTest(object):
    def __init__(self):
        print "__init__() called: object %08x created" % id(self)
    def __del__(self):
        print "__del__() called: object %08x destroyed" % id(self)

print "begin"
print "creating object, binding to name d"
d = DelTest()
print "adding reference bound to name x"
x = d
print "adding reference bound to lst[0]"
lst = []
lst.append(d)
print "deleting lst"
del(lst)
print "deleting x"
del(x)
print "deleting d"
del(d)
print "end"

Output from the above:

begin
creating object, binding to name d
__init__() called: object 01e4db50 created
adding reference bound to name x
adding reference bound to lst[0]
deleting lst
deleting x
deleting d
__del__() called: object 01e4db50 destroyed
end