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[3.8] bpo-40895: Update weakref documentation to remove old warnings (p…
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…ythonGH-20687)

The doccumentation at https://docs.python.org/3.10/library/weakref.html cautions that the `WeakKeyDictionary` and `WeakValueDictionary` are susceptible to the problem of dictionary mutation during iteration.

These notes present the user with a problem that has no easy solution.

I dug into the implementation and found that fortunately, Antoine Pitrou already addressed this challenge (10 years ago!) by introducing an `_IterationGuard` context manager to the implementation, which delays mutation while an iteration is in progress.

I asked for confirmation and @pitrou agreed that these notes could be removed:
python@c1baa601e2b558deb690edfdf334fceee3b03327GH-commitcomment-39514438.
(cherry picked from commit 1642c0e)

Co-authored-by: Daniel Fortunov <asqui@users.noreply.github.com>
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asqui authored and pitrou committed Jun 10, 2020
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14 changes: 0 additions & 14 deletions Doc/library/weakref.rst
Expand Up @@ -163,13 +163,6 @@ Extension types can easily be made to support weak references; see
application without adding attributes to those objects. This can be especially
useful with objects that override attribute accesses.

.. note::

Caution: Because a :class:`WeakKeyDictionary` is built on top of a Python
dictionary, it must not change size when iterating over it. This can be
difficult to ensure for a :class:`WeakKeyDictionary` because actions
performed by the program during iteration may cause items in the
dictionary to vanish "by magic" (as a side effect of garbage collection).

:class:`WeakKeyDictionary` objects have an additional method that
exposes the internal references directly. The references are not guaranteed to
Expand All @@ -189,13 +182,6 @@ than needed.
Mapping class that references values weakly. Entries in the dictionary will be
discarded when no strong reference to the value exists any more.

.. note::

Caution: Because a :class:`WeakValueDictionary` is built on top of a Python
dictionary, it must not change size when iterating over it. This can be
difficult to ensure for a :class:`WeakValueDictionary` because actions performed
by the program during iteration may cause items in the dictionary to vanish "by
magic" (as a side effect of garbage collection).

:class:`WeakValueDictionary` objects have an additional method that has the
same issues as the :meth:`keyrefs` method of :class:`WeakKeyDictionary`
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