Python Memory Management and Tips Transcripts
Chapter: Python variables and memory
Lecture: Let's talk pointers

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0:00 Now let's look at an example of some very, very simple code in C, C++ and first C++ it's a little bit complicated,
0:08 cause even simple code can get pretty complicated. But here it is. We're gonna look at this function so this is not object
0:16 oriented programming like C++ more on the C side, and what we're gonna do is we're gonna have two person structures or they could be classes
0:24 whatever. But we're gonna have two pointers notice the person star, not person, but persons star.
0:31 That means we're passing the address of where that thing is in memory rather than making a copy of its data and passing it along.
0:38 We're gonna take these two person objects that we're referring to by address and then we're gonna ask the question
0:42 "are they the same?" The way we do this in C is you go to the pointer, which is some place in memory.
0:50 In this particular example, it was something like this, like 0x7ff whatever it doesn't matter. This the value of this thing is just a place out
0:59 in memory. And here in that memory location on what's called the heap,
1:03 we've got two pieces of information, right? Two of these pointers point to those places out in memory. That's why we're gonna use
1:11 this arrow operator P1 goes to our dash greater than arrow, the id. So follow the pointer out and then find out there that memory
1:19 location what the id is and see if they're the same. So this is how it works in C,
1:26 and it raises a lot of questions that are maybe not even knowable here. For example, who owns these objects?
1:33 Who is responsible for creating them and ensuring that they get cleaned up correctly?
1:38 That answer could vary. It could be allocated in the stack of the thing that
1:42 called this function. It could be some other part of the program created it, and when it shuts down or that part cleans itself up,
1:49 it's supposed to delete those out of memory. How long will they stick around? I don't know. Until the other part,
1:55 whoever owns it, decides that they're going to go away. What happens if we forget? What happens if somehow the programmer lost track of that
2:04 piece of memory? Well, that's a memory leak, and it's just going to stay out there forever. There's nothing that's gonna fix it.
2:11 That's bad. But what's worse, usually is if actually it gets cleaned up too soon. And the reason is you'll still have that
2:17 p1 pointing to that memory address, But what is living out there is either gone or it's Some other piece or some partial piece of some other data,
2:26 and that could be all sorts of problems if it gets cleaned up too soon. So what I want you to take away from this is just there's a lot of
2:32 actual bookkeeping or accounting around things that were created, how long they live, whose job it is to clean them up, when they can do
2:40 it, and they've got to make sure that they don't forget to do it, but not too soon. Okay?
2:44 So all of these things are really tricky around C and pointers, and we'll see in Python that generally that's not what we have to do.
2:51 A lot of things are done for us, but we want to understand what is done for us. How is it done for us, and so on.


Talk Python's Mastodon Michael Kennedy's Mastodon