# Is there a duck-typing way to know we can't compile extensions? · Issue #80 · nedbat/coveragepy (original) (raw)

Originally reported by Zooko O'Whielacronx (Bitbucket: zooko, GitHub: zooko)

Is there a duck-typing way to know we can't compile extensions?

Yes! You try to build the extension and if it fails then you automatically fall back to using your pure-Python alternative. This way install will also succeed on a system without a C compiler, for example.

The example code that I crib from whenever I'm going to use this hack is simplejson:

http://simplejson.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/setup.py

• Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/ned/coveragepy/issue/80