The convention for refcounting in CPython is that a function
takes borrowed references as arguments and returns a new
reference.
The 'self' argument passed in is a borrowed reference. If you
want to return it, you need to create a new reference by
increfing it.
So what you have written is just the correct way to write
a do-nothing function that returns its argument, i.e. the
equivalent of the Python function
def f(self):
return self
As others have said, if you want to leak a reference, you
need an extra incref besides the one that's a normal part
of the return convention.
--
Greg
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