einspect 0.1.0

Extended Inspect - view and modify memory structs of runtime objects.

einspect

Extended Inspect for CPython

Provides simple and robust ways to view and modify the base memory structures of Python objects at runtime.

einspect is in very early stages of development, API may change at any time without notice.

Note: The below examples show interactions with a TupleView, but applies much the same way generically for many of the specialized View subtypes that are dynamically returned by the view function. If no specific view is implemented, the base View will be used which represents limited interactions on the assumption of PyObject struct parts.

from einspect import view

obj = (1, 2, 3)
v = view(obj)

print(v)

TupleView[tuple](<PyTupleObject at 0x10078dd00>)

1. Viewing python object struct attributes

State information of the underlying PyTupleObject struct can be accessed through the view's attributes.

print(v.ref_count)  # ob_refcnt
print(v.type)       # ob_type
print(v.size)       # ob_size
print(v.items)      # ob_item

4
<class 'tuple'>
3
<einspect.structs.c_long_Array_3 object at 0x105038ed0>

2. Writing to view attributes

Writing to these attributes will affect the underlying object of the view.

Note that most memory-unsafe attribute modifications require entering an unsafe context manager with View.unsafe()

with v.unsafe():
    v.size -= 1

print(obj)

(1, 2)

3. Writing to view attributes

Since items is an array of integer pointers to python objects, they can be replaced by id() addresses to modify index items in the tuple.

from einspect import view

tup = (100, 200)

with view(tup).unsafe() as v:
    s = "dog"
    v.item[0] = id(s)

print(tup)

('dog', 200)

>> Process finished with exit code 139 (interrupted by signal 11: SIGSEGV)

So here we did set the item at index 0 with our new item, the string "dog", but this also caused a segmentation fault. Note that the act of setting an item in containers like tuples and lists "steals" a reference to the object, even if we only supplied the address pointer.

To make this safe, we will have to manually increment a ref-count before the new item is assigned. To do this we can either create a view of our new item, and increment its ref_count += 1, or use the apis from einspect.api, which are pre-typed implementations of ctypes.pythonapi methods.

from einspect import view
from einspect.api import Py

tup = (100, 200)

with view(tup).unsafe() as v:
    a = "bird"
    Py.IncRef(a)
    v.item[0] = id(a)
    
    b = "kitten"
    Py.IncRef(b)
    v.item[1] = id(b)

print(tup)

('bird', 'kitten')

🎉 No more seg-faults, and we just successfully set both items in an otherwise immutable tuple.

To make the above routine easier, you can access an abstraction by simply indexing the view.

from einspect import view

tup = ("a", "b", "c")

v = view(tup)
v[0] = 123
v[1] = "hm"
v[2] = "🤔"

print(tup)

(123, 'hm', '🤔')