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

Armin Rigo arigo at tunes.org
Sat Mar 2 09:48:42 CET 2013

Hi Gregory,

On Sat, Mar 2, 2013 at 8:40 AM, Gregory P. Smith <greg at krypto.org> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 7:57 AM, Eli Bendersky <eliben at gmail.com> wrote: So would you say that the main use of the API level is provide an alternative for writing C API code to interface to C libraries. IOW, it's in competition with Swig? I'd hardly call it competition. The primary language I interface with is C++ and cffi appears not see that giant elephant in the room

I don't think it's in competition with Swig, which does C++. There are certain workloads in which C++ is the elephant in the room; we don't address such workloads. If you want some more motivation, the initial goal was to access the large number of standard Linux/Posix libraries that are C (or have a C interface), but are too hard to access for ctypes (macros, partially-documented structure types, #define for constants, etc.). For this goal, it works great.

(it'd need to use clang for parsing if it were going to do that)...

I fear parsing is merely the tip of the iceberg when we talk about interfacing with C++.

A bientôt,

Armin.

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