[Python-Dev] cffi in stdlib (original) (raw)

Maciej Fijalkowski fijall at gmail.com
Wed Feb 27 10:21:31 CET 2013

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 11:18 AM, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com> wrote:

On 27 Feb, 2013, at 10:06, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 9:29 AM, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com> wrote:

On 26 Feb, 2013, at 16:13, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com> wrote:

Hello.

I would like to discuss on the language summit a potential inclusion of cffi[1] into stdlib. The API in general looks nice, but I do have some concens w.r.t. including cffi in the stdlib. 1. Why is cffi completely separate from ctypes, instead of layered on top of it? That is, add a utility module to ctypes that can parse C declarations and generate the right ctypes definitions. Because ctypes API is a mess and magic. We needed a cleaner (and much smaller) model. The major advantages of starting over is probably that you can hide the complexity and that opens opportunities for optimizations. That said, I'm not convinced that ctypes is unnecessarily complex.

I implemented ctypes. It is.

4. And finally a technical concern: how well does cffi work with fat binaries on OSX? In particular, will the distutils support generate cached data for all architectures supported by a fat binary?

no idea. That's somehting that will have to be resolved before cffi can be included in the stdlib, fat binaries are supported by CPython and are used the binary installers. Ronald

if cpython supports it and you can load it using dlopen, it does work then (it really is just building a C extension on the API level).

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