[Python-Dev] Include ctypes into core Python? (original) (raw)

Thomas Wouters thomas at xs4all.net
Wed Jan 11 00:23:24 CET 2006


On Tue, Jan 10, 2006 at 01:14:13PM -0800, Guido van Rossum wrote:

On the other hand it breaks one of the most fundamental Python guidelines: if you get a core dump (segfault etc.) it's a bug in Python or in a 3rd party extension, not in your Python code. An exception would have to be made for any code that uses ctypes, as it is usually trivial to cause core dumps with ctypes (I'd venture it's hard to avoid them ;-).

Aside from 'dl', what was also pointed out in c.l.py was the crashability of Python in general, even from pure Python code:

centurion:~ > python < . Segmentation fault

[...]

sys.setrecursionlimit(1<<30) f = lambda f:f(f) f(f) Segmentation fault

There's more, all from Python itself. And sure, "well, don't do that then" is a perfectly valid response to most of these harebrained tricks, but it does put a lie to the 'uncrashable python' idea :)

Not-for-or-against-including-ctypes-anyway'ly y'rs,

Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>

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