[Python-Dev] Let's update CObject API so it is safe and regular! (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Apr 2 19:53:40 CEST 2009

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 10:24 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

Guido van Rossum <guido python.org> writes:

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 6:22 AM, Jim Fulton <jim zope.com> wrote: > The original use case for CObjects was to export an API from a module, in > which case, you'd be importing the API from the module. I consider this the only use case. What other use cases are there? I don't know if it is good style, but I could imagine it being used to accumulate non-PyObject data in a Python container (e.g. a list), without too much overhead. It is used in getargs.c to manage a list of "destructors" of temporarily created data for when a call to PyArgParse* fails.

Well, that sounds like it really just needs to manage a variable-length array of void pointers, and using PyList and PyCObject is just laziness (and perhaps the wrong kind -- I imagine I could write the same code without using Python objects and it would be cleaner and faster).

So no, I don't consider that a valid use case, or at least not one we need to consider for backwards compatibility of the PyCObject design.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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