Re-initializing Python modules compiled with maturin

[holzschu]

Hi,
I'll be the first to acknowledge that my issues are very peculiar, and that this is about a very exotic platform. I'm asking the question in hope that I can get some help.

I'm compiling and running Python on iOS. Cross-compiling Python modules using maturin is now a breaze, thanks to all the hard work here. I can now include modules like rpds and cryptography in my Python builds.

I'm am currently stuck on the next step: I need to be able to quit the Python interpreter, and restart it at a later time. That requires cleaning up the memory, freeing up everything that was allocated, and (at a later date) reallocating it (I do acknowledge that is a very specific issue).

In my current state of affairs, with modules created with maturin (rpds, namely, but it uses just: #[pymodule(gil_used = false)]), deallocation works fine (the md_dict pointer is set to NULL, same with md_name), but the pointer to the module itself is not set to NULL. When I run the initialization a second time, it returns the same pointer to the module, but it does not recreate the md_dict dictionary and other members. As a consequence, Python crashes when trying to access a NULL pointer.

Is there any way I could fix this, either without changing pyo3 and maturin, or with minimal changes to pyo3 and maturin?

[messense]

I don't have the knowledge to answer this, transferred from maturin to pyo3 for better visibility.

[holzschu]

Thanks.

[MatthieuDartiailh]

This probably comes from the fact that currently PyO3 does not use the multi-phase module initialization. Work is ongoing in #4162