[Python-Dev] PEP 384 status (original) (raw)

Daniel Stutzbach daniel at stutzbachenterprises.com
Tue Aug 31 21:36:00 CEST 2010

On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 4:54 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:

Is it possible to have multiple versions of the lib C loaded on Windows ?

Yes, and it's a pretty common situation. The fopen() that I call within a DLL may not be the same fopen() called by another DLL. When writing a DLL for Windows, the API must be designed with the assumption that anything returned by the C library cannot be passed a different C library. For example, suppose I a expose a function in my DLL that allocates some memory, populates it with useful information, and returns a pointer. I must also supply a function to free the memory. I cannot ask the caller to simply call free(), because their free() may not be using the same heap as my malloc().

Likewise, a FILE * isn't safe to pass around, unless I can guarantee that the application really is one big happy family compiled against the same version of the C library.

Daniel Stutzbach, Ph.D. President, Stutzbach Enterprises, LLC <http://stutzbachenterprises.com> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20100831/d3259ac1/attachment.html>

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