Hello everyone,
I'm trying to do something in C calling Python and its failing. I'd be
grateful if you could take a look and hopefully you have an answer.
What I'm trying to do is determine the address of the "collect" function
in the "gc" module. I want to do this so that we can determine when a
garbage collection happens, regardless of how it is triggered
(explicitly by a user call, or implicitly by the behaviour of the
program allocating lots of data).
As far as I can tell, the gc.collect function is not exposed as a C API,
so I cannot hook that to do the monitoring I want. Therefore the only
way to get the address to hook is to inspect the Python module function
dictionaries, well I think its the only way :-)
The approach is to get the module that holds "gc". You can do this by
calling PyImport_AddMod ule for an existing module - it will return it.
Then you get the dictionary of methods from the module and lookup the
method in there. Well, that was my theory after looking at the Python
source code.
I've shown the source code below.
// get "collect" method from GC module
// this module should always be present
// as it is a fundamental part of Python
PyObject *module;
DWORD funcAddress = NULL;
module = PyImport_AddMod ule("gc");
if (module != NULL)
{
// get dictionary of methods for this module
PyObject *dict;
dict = PyModule_GetDic t(module);
if (dict != NULL)
{
// lookup "collect" in the dictionary
PyObject *func;
int numItems;
// check we have some elements,
// strangely there are only 2
numItems = PyDict_Size(dic t);
// this works, good, that is expected
func = PyDict_GetItemS tring(dict, "__name__") ;
// this fails, why? "collect" is a method in "gc"
// I would expect it to work
func = PyDict_GetItemS tring(dict, "collect");
}
}
Hopefully someone can shed some light on why this doesn't work, or
explain what the correct method should be if I am doing the wrong thing.
Answers as descriptions, Python or C most welcome.
Cheers
Stephen
--
Stephen Kellett
Object Media Limited http://www.objmedia.demon.co.uk/software.html
Computer Consultancy, Software Development
Windows C++, Java, Assembler, Performance Analysis, Troubleshooting
