[Python-Dev] Request commit privileges for Stefan Krah (original) (raw)

Mark Dickinson dickinsm at gmail.com
Mon Dec 14 20:38:18 CET 2009

I'd like to request that Stefan Krah be granted commit privileges to the Python svn repository, for the sole purpose of working on a (yet to be created) py3k-decimal-in-c branch.

Stefan has produced a C library 'libmpdec' implementing (fast!) arbitrary precision decimal arithmetic, together with a Python extension module 'Cdecimal' that provides full compatibility with Python's decimal module. The current version of the code can be found at:

http://www.bytereef.org/libmpdec-download.html

It's currently licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, but Stefan has indicated that he's willing to relicense it to the PSF under a contributor agreement.

We'd like to start work on a branch that integrates Stefan's work into the Python source tree, with the hope that this work could be considered for inclusion in py3k when it's completed.

While I haven't yet done anything resembling a thorough code review of Stefan's code, the code I have looked at has seemed very high quality, and gives me a high degree of confidence in its correctness. Stefan's also done a truly ridiculous amount of correctness and compatibility testing of this code, and in the process discovered several corner case bugs in Python's decimal module.

(I'm not yet asking for a decision on whether the decimal module should be replaced with a C version; that decision should be easier to make once Stefan's code is fully integrated into the branch, and we have some timings and benchmarks to show the performance benefit. There are also various other questions about a C version of decimal that will eventually need to addressed, but I don't want to distract from the main point of this message.)

Mark

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