Commented Feature: pykd + IDAPython: crash [14005]

Hi,

I'm Arnaud Diederen, one of the developers at www.hex-rays.com, and contributor to IDAPython (Python bindings to IDA's API.)

The following discussion will require the following bits of background:
- IDA is the main application
- IDAPython is an IDA plugin, loaded very early by IDA, that loads python2.7.dll
- IDA has a WinDbg debugger backend
- IDA provides an input field for the WinDbg debugger backend, so that users can type WinDbg commands directly

Recently, one of our customers came to us saying that trying to ".load pykd" causes IDA to crash.

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I could reproduce the issue, and came to the following conclusions: at setup time ( https://pykd.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest#branch/0.3.x/pykd/windbgext.cpp ), pykd does the following:
- Py_Initialize();
- PyEval_InitThreads();
- python::object main = boost::python::import("__main__");

This third statement causes the crash, because the current 'thread' (from a Python runtime point-of-view) is NULL, because Py_Initialize() is a no-op in this case: the Python runtime had already been initialized earlier by the IDAPython plugin.

Unless I'm mistaken, the issue here lies with pykd assuming that it initializes the runtime itself and thus can perform CPython calls.

Is my understanding correct?
If so, do you think there's a way/need to fix this, or is this a use-case you don't really want to support?

Thank you for any feedback,
A.
Comments: ** Comment from web user: aundro **

@ussrhero: thank you very much for the input; this seems to work fine!