Crash report

What happened?

dir() can cause a native stack overflow when an object's __class__
provides a cyclic __bases__ attribute.

Minimal reproducer:

class Fake:
    pass

a = Fake()
a.__bases__ = (a,)

class C:
    @property
    def __class__(self):
        return a

print("entering", flush=True)
dir(C())
print("survived", flush=True)

Observed Result

On CPython 3.16.0a0 built from commit 5107fd700d7:

entering
timeout: the monitored command dumped core
Segmentation fault
rc=139

The crash occurs because object.__dir__() obtains the object's __class__ and merge_class_dict() recursively traverses __bases__ without a recursion guard. A cyclic __bases__ therefore causes unbounded native recursion and eventually a SIGSEGV.

The analogous __bases__ traversal in abstract_issubclass() already uses _Py_EnterRecursiveCall().

I also verified that adding a recursion guard to merge_class_dict() changes the failure from a native crash to a catchable exception:

RecursionError: Stack overflow (used 8120 kB) in __bases__

A regression test covering the cyclic __bases__ case was also added to Lib/test/test_builtin.py and passes with:

./python -m test test_builtin -m test_dir
== Tests result: SUCCESS ==
1 test OK.

CPython versions tested on:

CPython main branch

Operating systems tested on:

Linux

Output from running 'python -VV' on the command line:

Python 3.16.0a0 (heads/investigate-0071-dir-cyclic-bases-dirty:5107fd700d7, Aug 9 2026, 21:10:20) [GCC 13.3.0]

Linked PRs

• gh-155452: Prevent recursion crash in dir() #155453