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

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Wed Sep 1 00:42:38 CEST 2010

On Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:23:42 +1200 Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

Daniel Stutzbach wrote:

> 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. Given that, it seems to me that it's a mistake for Python to provide any APIs that take a FILE* directly in the first place.

What I think would be a mistake would be to define the API in terms of Windows-specific quirks. All this discussion seems bent on satisfying the needs of Windows developers at the expense of non-Windows developers. "FILE*" is a perfectly standard C feature (and a widely-used one at that). If Windows doesn't handle it correctly then it's a Windows issue and we shouldn't annoy other people by refusing access to that feature.

Again, putting a warning in the documentation should be enough for those people who want to have perfect Windows support. And if the Microsoft compiler/linker doesn't bother warning the user when passing FILE* between various CRTs, then it's not Python's job to supplement it.

After all, we don't usually try to workaround platform-specific bugs (not as a low level such as the C API level); at worse, we mention their existence in the docs.

Regards

Antoine.

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