[Python-Dev] CFFI released (original) (raw)

Armin Rigo arigo at tunes.org
Mon Jun 18 15:14:25 CEST 2012

Hi all,

We (=fijal and myself) finally released the beta-0.1 version of CFFI.

http://cffi.readthedocs.org/

It is a(nother) simple Foreign Function Interface for Python calling C code. I talked about it with a few python core people during the PyCon sprint; now it's done, with a pure Python part and a compact (but still 3000 lines) piece of C code. The goal is for it to be simple yet as complete as possible; it can be used in places where ctypes (say) is not applicable or only with platform-specific difficulties, e.g. to rewrite a "_curses" module in pure Python, or access the X libraries, etc.

Of course I'm not going to suggest that it should be part of the standard library right now, but I do hope that over time, should it prove useful and used, I could come back and make such a suggestion. In any case it looks like we are going to write native and JITted PyPy support for it, and change our pure Python "_ctypes" implementation to be based on "cffi". As it is much more compact to support than the full _ctypes, it is also good for Jython and IronPython.

A bientôt,

Armin.

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