@pablogsal @lysnikolaou @gvanrossum @isidentical: Are you ok to remove the symbol table C API from the public C API?

I failed to find any user of it. A search for PySymtable_Free in GitHub code search (C code) only lists copies of the CPython code base (symtablemodule.c and symtable.h files): I looked at the first 50 results (5 pages).

For me, the symbol table is an interdemediate state which is only used internally by the Python compiler, but it should not be exposed outside Python.

If you consider that maybe someone somewhere might use it, we can continue to export symbols in libpython. But I would prefer to still rename functions (replace Py with _Py) if we remove them from the public C API.

The PEP 384 https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0384/ explicitly excluded symtable.h from the limited C API (stable ABI)... But it seems like sadly Py_SymtableString() landed into the stable ABI by mistake. IMO it's perfectly safe to remove it. It returns the struct symtable* type which is excluded from the limited C API.

The Python symtable module remains available and is unchanged.

For me, the symbol table is an interdemediate state which is only used internally by the Python compiler, but it should not be exposed outside Python.

Yeah, I will be +1 of removing it from the public C AP. Sharing low-level C structs publicly have proven to put us in corners that can be uncomfortable and this module (the python version and these functions from the C-API) is very niche so it should not affect anyone.

landed into the stable ABI by mistake.

As PEP 384 doesn't include it in the stable ABI I think is fine because we never publicly documented it (is also not in the docs AFAUK).

See also PR #24911 "Remove PyAST_Validate() function".

Rename functions:
PyST_GetScope() to _PyST_GetScope()
PySymtable_Build() to _PySymtable_Build()
PySymtable_BuildObject() to _PySymtable_BuildObject()
PySymtable_Free() to _PySymtable_Free()

I searched for these 4 functions in the top 4000 PyPI packages: they are not used.

Only graphene-federation-0.1.0.tar.gz contains them, but it's because the tarball contains a whole copy of a virtual environement which contains a "python" binary (!) which contains the symbols.

I modified the PR to clarify that Py_SymtableString() was not usable with the stable ABI:

The Py_SymtableString() function was part the stable ABI by mistake
but it could not be used, because the symtable.h header file was
excluded from the limited C API.

@pablogsal: Would you mind to formally approve the PR and review the updated PR? I'm not sure if you clearly approved it or not :-)

I will review this today. Ping me if I have not done it by EOD