Hi, Serhiy Storchaka seems to be worried by the high numbers of commits in https://bugs.python.org/issue32030 "PEP 432: Rewrite Py_Main()", so let me explain the context of this work :-)
To prepare CPython to implement my UTF-8 Mode PEP (PEP 540), I worked on the implementation of Nick Coghlan's PEP 432: PEP 432 -- Restructuring the CPython startup sequence https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0432/ The startup sequence is a big pile of code made of multiple functions: main(), Py_Main(), Py_Initialize(), Py_Finalize()... and a lot of tiny "configuration" functions like Py_SetPath(). Over the years, many configuration options were added in the middle of the code. The priority of configuration options is not always correct between command line options, envrionment variables, configuration files (like "pyenv.cfg"), etc. For technical reasons, it's hard to impement properly the -E option (ignore PYTHON* environment variables). For example, the new PYTHONCOERCECLOCALE environment variable (of PEP 538) doesn't handle properly -E (it ignores -E), because it was too complex to support -E. -- I'm working on fixing this. Last weeks, I mostly worked on the Py_Main() function, Modules/getpath.c and PC/getpathp.c, to "refactor" the code: * Split big functions (300 to 500 lines) into multiple small functions (50 lines or less), to make it easily to follow the control flow and to allow to more easily move code * Replace static and global variables with memory allocated on the heap. * Reorganize how the configuration is read: populate a first temporary structure (_PyMain using wchar_t*), then create Python objects (_PyMainInterpreterConfig) to finish with the real configuration (like setting attributes of the sys module). The goal is to centralize all code reading configuration to fix the priority and to simplify the code. My motivation was to write a correct implementation of the UTF-8 Mode (PEP 540). Nick's motivation is to make CPython easily to embed. His plan for Python 3.8 is to give access to the new _PyCoreConfig and _PyMainInterpreterConfig structures to: * easily give access to most (if not all?) configuration options to "embedders" * allow to configure Python without environment variables, command line options, configuration files, but only using these structures * allow to configure Python using Python objects (PyObject*) rather than C types (like wchar_t*) (I'm not sure that I understood correctly, so please read the PEP 432 ;-)) IMHO the most visible change of the PEP 432 is to split Python initialization in two parts: * Core: strict minimum to use the Python C API * Main: everything else The goal is to introduce the opportunity to configure Python between Core and Main. The implementation is currently a work-in-progress. Nick will not have the bandwidth, neither do I, to update his PEP and finish the implementation, before Python 3.7. So this work remains private until at least Python 3.8. Another part of the work is to enhance the documentation. You can for example now find an explicit list of C functions which can be called before Py_Initialize(): https://docs.python.org/dev/c-api/init.html#before-python-initialization And also a list of functions that must not be called before Py_Initialize(), whereas you might want to call them :-) Victor _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
