[Python-Dev] Let's change to C API! (original) (raw)

Victor Stinner vstinner at redhat.com
Tue Jul 31 12:25:25 EDT 2018

I replied on capi-sig.

2018-07-31 18:03 GMT+02:00 Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net>:

On Tue, 31 Jul 2018 15:34:05 +0200 Victor Stinner <vstinner at redhat.com> wrote:

Antoine: would you mind to subscribe to the capi-sig mailing list? As expected, they are many interesting points discussed here, but I would like to move all C API discussions to capi-sig. I only continue on python-dev since you started here (and ignored my request to start discussing my idea on capi-sig :-)). Well, I responded to your e-mail discussion thread. I see more messages in this thread here than on capi-sig. ;-)

For example, PyPy uses different memory allocators depending on the scope and the lifetime of an object. I'm not sure that you can implement such optimization if you are stuck with reference counting. But what does reference counting have to do with memory allocators exactly? > OS vendors seem to be doing a fine job AFAICT. And if I want a recent > Python I just download Miniconda/Anaconda.

Is it used in production to deploy services? Or is it more used by developers? I never used Anaconda. I don't know, but there's no hard reason why you couldn't use it to deploy services (though some people may prefer Docker or other technologies). > I think you don't realize that the C API is already annoying. People > started with it mostly because there wasn't a better alternative at the > time. You don't need to make it more annoying than it already is ;-) > > Replacing existing C extensions with something else is entirely a > developer time/effort problem, not an attractivity problem. And I'm > not sure that porting a C extension to a new C API is more reasonable > than porting to Cython entirely. Do you think that it's doable to port numpy to Cython? It's made of 255K lines of C code. Numpy is a bit special as it exposes its own C API, so porting it entirely to Cython would be difficult (how do you expose a C macro in Cython?). Also, internally it has a lot of macro-generated code for specialized loop implementations (metaprogramming in C :-)). I suppose some bits could be (re)written in Cython. Actually, the numpy.random module is already a Cython module. > It's just that I disagree that removing the C API will make CPython 2x > faster. How can we make CPython 2x faster? Why everybody, except of PyPy, failed to do that? Because PyPy spent years working full time on a JIT compiler. It's also written in (a dialect of) Python, which helps a lot with experimenting and building abstractions, compared to C or even C++. Regards Antoine.

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