Learn Python – Interactive Python

Before discussing the actual implementation of the compiler, a discussion of how memory is handled is in order. To make memory management simple, an arena is used. This means that a memory is pooled in a single location for easy allocation and removal. What this gives us is the removal of explicit memory deallocation. Because memory allocation for all needed memory in the compiler registers that memory with the arena, a single call to free the arena is all that is needed to completely free all memory used by the compiler.

In general, unless you are working on the critical core of the compiler, memory management can be completely ignored. But if you are working at either the very beginning of the compiler or the end, you need to care about how the arena works. All code relating to the arena is in either Include/pyarena.h or Python/pyarena.c.

PyArena_New() will create a new arena. The returned PyArena structure will store pointers to all memory given to it. This does the bookkeeping of what memory needs to be freed when the compiler is finished with the memory it used. That freeing is done with PyArena_Free(). This only needs to be called in strategic areas where the compiler exits.

As stated above, in general you should not have to worry about memory management when working on the compiler. The technical details have been designed to be hidden from you for most cases.

The only exception comes about when managing a PyObject. Since the rest of Python uses reference counting, there is extra support added to the arena to cleanup each PyObject that was allocated. These cases are very rare. However, if you’ve allocated a PyObject, you must tell the arena about it by calling PyArena_AddPyObject().