Query status of GSoC project: CPyChecker

[Steven Sun <StevenSun2021@hotmail.com>]

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Hi Eric, I am Steven (now) from the CPython team.

How is the project going? Do you have any prototypes
or ideas that can be discussed? Which part will you start at?


I recently debugged dozens of Python bugs, some involving
C APIs. I can provide some test cases for you.


For the ref count part:

A major change (immortal objects) is introduced in Python 3.12.
Basically, immortal objects will have the ref count fixed at
a very large number (depending on `sizeof(void*)` ). But I
don't think it is necessary to implement this in the early
stages.

Some stable API steals reference conditionally (on success),
thus its behavior cannot be simply described by one attribute.


For CPython versions:

Some stable CPython API behavior varied across the minor
release. (eg. 3.10 -> 3.11) For instance, some API accepted
NULL as args for <3.8, but not >=3.8.

Considering both "GCC" and "CPython" are hard for users to
upgrade, we might want to consider how to live with these
behavioral differences in the first place.

Versions older than 3 minor releases cannot be touched. (3.13
now in active development, 3.12, 3.11 for bug fixes, 3.10, 3.9
security fixes only) So, versions <= 3.10 can be treated as frozen.