[Python-Dev] reference counting in Py3K (original) (raw)

Fernando Perez fperez.net at gmail.com
Thu Sep 8 22:05:15 CEST 2005

Josiah Carlson wrote:

Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com> wrote:

Would you care to elaborate on the reasons behind the 'ick'? I'm a big fan of weave.inline and have used it very successfully for my own needs, so I'm genuinely curious (as I tend to teach its use, I like to know of potential problems I may not have seen). 1. Mixing multiple languages in a single source file is bad form, yet it seems to be encouraged in weave.inline and other such packages (it becomes a big deal when the handful of Python becomes 20+ lines of C).

Agreed. I only use inline with explicit C strings for very short stuff, and typically use a little load_C_snippet() utility I wrote. That lets me keep the C sources in real C files, with proper syntax highlighting in Xemacs and whatnot.

[... summary of weave problems]

Agreed. I admit that some of my issues would likely be lesser if I were to start to use inline now, with additional experience with such things. But with a few thousand lines of Pyrex and C working right now, I'm hard pressed to convince anyone (including myself) that such a switch is worthwhile.

Thanks for your input. I certainly wasn't trying to suggest you change, I was just curious about your experiences. If you ever see this again, specific feedback on the scipy list would be very welcome. While I'm not 'officially' a scipy developer, I care enough about weave that occasionally I dig in and go in bugfixing expeditions. With proper bug reports we could improve a system which I think has a place (especially for scientific computing, with the Blitz support for arrays, which gives Numpy-like arrays in C++). I don't see weave as a competitor to pyrex, but rather as an alternate tool which can be excellent in certain contexts, and which I'd like to see improve whre possible.

Regards,

f

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