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Pointers and Memory Management in Python

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Re: Pointers and Memory Management in Python

#31

Post by mkesper »

lr4444lr wrote: post #8
linkdd wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once compiled to assembly, every data is accessed via pointers. Every data structure is represented with pointers. Almost everything is a pointer. According to you, all softwares are broken and harmful? Programming languages can provide a safe interface to pointers (just like Rust do with `Box `, `Rc `, `Arc `, or C++ in some ways with `shared_ptr ` and `unique_ptr `). Also, "Why not?" here clearly means "I did it fo…

Cmon. In a good faith reading, he means as a matter of developer access. And he's not wrong as concerns what 90+% of devs have to get done at their jobs.

Exactly. Should have written "access to raw pointers for developers".

Re: Pointers and Memory Management in Python

#34

Post by psychoslave »

linkdd wrote: post #18
lanstin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laziness is one of the cardinal virtues of a programmer.

There is good laziness: - Don't Repeat Yourself - Don't Reinvent the Wheel - ... And bad laziness: - I don't want to do this because I need to be careful - I don't need/want to understand what's going on as long as it works - ... The latter is what leads to most issues/bugs.

> I don't want to do this because I need to be careful

The topic here is more about: how reliable is the worst version of the weakest part of your team on this particular development tool? People life can be filled with terrible events that will have side effect on their vigilance at work. And even just counting on the catastrophe that just happened in production, pressure can make you trade scrupulosity for immediate operational efficiency.

I prefer tools that help me to reduce cognitive load.

Re: Pointers and Memory Management in Python

#36

Post by omnicognate »

cuteboy19 wrote: post #3

Ok now this truly awful print(1, 2) # prints "2 2" Pointers are bad but this implementation is broken. There is no way to do this using pointers IRL.

It's absolutely pure unadulterated evil, deliberately overwriting memory owned by the interpreter in ways that the author knows will result in corruption, bizarre behaviour and crashes.

It's also a 13 year old awesomely messing around with cpython internals in their spare time. Bravo!

Re: Pointers and Memory Management in Python

#37

Post by cutler »

lanstin wrote: post #17
gswdh wrote: post #4

I don’t understand the problem people have with pointers, they are an amazing tool. And the negative attitude towards manual memory allocation just seems like laziness to me and even suggests a lack of understanding for both what you’re doing and how computers work.

Laziness is one of the cardinal virtues of a programmer.

The others being Impatience and Hubris.

Re: Pointers and Memory Management in Python

#39

Post by [deleted] »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #25
lanstin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 and 2 are objects in Python. You can change the field corresponding to the int value of the field for the object pointed to by 1. Even worse small ints are cached, so now you have changed 1 for the entire interpreter.

One small step towards Fortran

[deleted]
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