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gh-159184: Make the marshal order of set elements with equal dumps stable - #159197

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gpshead:marshal-set-tie-order
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gpshead wants to merge 2 commits into
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gpshead:marshal-set-tie-order

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@gpshead

@gpshead gpshead commented Oct 11, 2026 •

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Note

Draft: stacked on #159192. This branch contains that PR's commit; only the last commit is new. It stays a draft until #159192 is merged, and will then be rebased onto main.

This is the second half of gh-159184. The first half, #159196 (merged), stopped marshal from comparing set elements, which fixed the TypeError for complex NaNs. This PR fixes the order such elements are written in.

Set elements with the same dump are NaNs that are distinct objects. marshal leaves them in set iteration order, which is the order of their addresses. That is invisible unless one of them is also referenced elsewhere in the dump; then the reference lands at a different place among them from run to run:

>>> nans = [float('nan') for _ in range(3)]
>>> len({marshal.dumps([n, set(nans)]) for n in nans})
3                             # the same value every time; 1 with this PR

Change

flowchart TB
  subgraph before["main"]
    direction TB
    b1["list of (dump, index, element)"] --> b2["PyList_Sort()"]
    b2 --> b3{"run of equal dumps?"}
    b3 -- no --> b4["ordered by dump"]
    b3 -- yes --> b5["left in set order<br>= address order"]
  end
  subgraph after["this PR"]
    direction TB
    a1["array of {element, dump}"] --> a2["qsort() on the dump bytes"]
    a2 --> a3{"run of equal dumps?"}
    a3 -- no --> a4["ordered by dump"]
    a3 -- yes --> a5["w_same_set_items()"]
    a5 --> a6["already written in this dump:<br>first, in the order written"]
    a5 --> a7["floats and complex not written yet:<br>interchangeable; which one is which<br>is decided when one is referenced again"]
  end
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Not covered

Elements that are containers with equal dumps, not written before the set (for example {(nan1,), (nan2,)} with one of the NaNs also used elsewhere), are still written in set order. A canonical order for that case amounts to graph canonisation. The compiler cannot produce it: every folded NaN is a new object.

Tests

ReferenceTestCase.test_nan_in_set_order checks exact bytes for sets of float and complex NaNs with references before, after and through other sets. test_nan_in_set also covers complex NaNs.

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read-the-docs-community Bot commented Oct 11, 2026 •

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Documentation build overview

📚 cpython-previews | 🛠️ Build #35080091 | 📁 Comparing a4b8ab9 against main (e878e1e)

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2 files changed
± c-api/marshal.html
± whatsnew/changelog.html

@gpshead
gpshead force-pushed the marshal-set-tie-order branch from 6df4e3f to 0e89222 Compare October 11, 2026 22:00
The marshal writer decided whether an object can be referenced later
(FLAG_REF) from its reference count, so the output for the same value
depended on what else in the process held a reference to its parts, and
differed between the default and the free-threaded builds' view of the
same objects.  This is the remaining cause of pythongh-129724 and the cause of
pythongh-156504.

FLAG_REF is now set exactly on the objects which are written more than
once in the dump.  The writer still makes one pass: it records the
position of the type byte of each object it remembers and of each
TYPE_REF, and when the dump is complete it sets the flags and renumbers
the references.  A reference count of one is only used to skip the
hashtable.  Interned strings are no longer flagged unconditionally.

The reader is unchanged and the format version is not bumped: both the
old and the new output are loaded by old and new readers.

PyMarshal_WriteObjectToFile() now builds the data in memory and writes
it with one fwrite(), since the flags are only known at the end.
Nothing is written if the object cannot be marshalled.
…mps stable

Set elements with the same dump (NaNs which are distinct objects) were
written in set iteration order, which depends on their addresses.  When
one of them is also referenced elsewhere in the dump, the position of
the reference among them changed from run to run.

Elements with equal dumps are now ordered by when they were first
written in this dump; floats and complex numbers not written yet are
interchangeable, and which one is which is decided when one of them is
referenced again.  This relies on the writer knowing exactly which
objects it has written (pythongh-129724).

The elements are sorted with qsort() on the bytes of their dumps,
in an array instead of a list of tuples.
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