Following an experiment done by Georges Racinet, we now have a working way of
sharing references between Python and Rust. This is needed in many points of
the codebase, for example every time we need to expose an iterator to a
Rust-backed Python class.
In a few words, references are (unsafely) marked as 'static and coupled
with manual reference counting; we are doing manual borrow-checking.
This changes introduces two declarative macro to help reduce boilerplate.
While it is better than not using macros, they are not perfect. They need to:
- Integrate with the garbage collector for container types (not needed
as of yet), as stated in the docstring
- Allow for leaking multiple attributes at the same time
- Inject the py_shared_state data attribute in py_class-generated
structs
- Automatically namespace the functions and attributes they generate
For at least the last two points, we will need to write a procedural macro
instead of a declarative one.
While this reference-sharing mechanism is being ironed out I thought it best
not to implement it yet.
Lastly, and implementation detail renders our Rust-backed Python iterators too
strict to be proper drop-in replacements, as will be illustrated in a future
patch: if the data structure referenced by a non-depleted iterator is mutated,
an AlreadyBorrowed exception is raised, whereas Python would allow it, only
to raise a RuntimeError if next is called on said iterator. This will have
to be addressed at some point.
You aren't really using the RefCell type here. It might be better to just use Cell for the count and UnsafeCell for the data.