Re: [xml] Support for Python

[Matt Sergeant <matt sergeant org>]

On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Daniel Veillard wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 07:59:18PM +0000, Matt Sergeant wrote:
> > On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> > >   I don't think we can have garbage collectable xmlDoc, though nearly
> > > every other classes exposed should be garbageable.
> >
> > We do this with a proxy object in the Perl interface - the proxy simply
> > makes sure that the refcount doesn't get lost, and then DESTROY
> > (equivalent of __del__) does the xmlFree stuff. Works mostly quite well,
> > though it's a bit tricky to debug.
>
>   Does that mean that each time you export a new object (attribute,
> element, etc...) from the interface you inc the ref and dec it each time
> one of those is destroyed ?

Yes. Well, inc the ref of whatever was in the proxy object.

>   The problem is to keep all this coherent in case of more complex operations
> like cut an past or if the doc reference from those node disapear. Sounds
> tricky to debug all case, I agree. Question, is it worth it ?

No, it's not really worth it [1]. I've got my hopes now on the XML::GDOME
module which of course just uses libgdome's memory management. Finding and
fixing these refcount bugs is just too damn hard.

[1] Well in some ways its worth it, like the fact that we got a very very
fast DOM that mostly works and we can pass to libxslt.

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