Handling the three-way exits of generators and coroutines efficiently.

[markshannon]

Python has two kinds of callables: functions and generators/coroutines.

Functions have a two-way exit: return or raise. Coroutines have a three-way exit: return, yield or raise.

Because generators and coroutines are newer, a lot of the C code in genobject.c, ceval.c and related files squeezes the three-way exit into a two-way exit using StopIteration and StopAsyncIteration which is really clunky and inefficient.

Instead of squeezing three-way exits into two-ways exits, we should be broadening the two-way exits into three-way exits, when needed.

For example, we can drop the throwflag argument from _PyEval_EvalFrameDefault by implementing gen.throw() in bytecode. We can do this because bytecode already handles the three-way exit in FOR_ITER and SEND as follows:

• Return: jump
• Yield: push value to stack
• Raise: propagate.

gen.send() can be implemented as something like:

  LOAD_FAST     0 (self)
  LOAD_FAST     1 (value)
  SETUP_FINALLY exception_handler
  SEND               returned
  POP_BLOCK
  RETURN_VALUE
returned:
  LOAD_CONST       StopIteration
  PUSH_NULL
  SWAP 3
  CALL                     1
  RAISE_VARARGS            1
exception_handler:
  LOAD_CONST       StopIteration
  CHECK_EXC_MATCH
  POP_JUMP_FORWARD_IF_FALSE    reraise
  POP_TOP
  PUSH_NULL
  LOAD_CONST      RuntimeError
  CALL                     0
  RAISE_VARARGS            1
reraise:
   RERAISE                  0

gen.throw(), etc. can be implemented similarly. See https://github.com/faster-cpython/ideas/issues/67#issuecomment-1004866159

Of course, we still need to have some C functions, not everything can be done in bytecode. For those functions, we should use something like the interface of gen_send_ex2 which returns the kind of exit, and uses an out parameter for the value

PySendResult gen_send_ex2(..., PyObject **presult ,..);