One problem concerns extensions. PYthon loves .so files. Plan 9,
obviously, does not.
Lots of tools are structured in a way that's going to be a real pain
in the ass to fix. Python doesn't do 'make'. what it does is a
standard python setup.py build type of thing...
The consensus seems to be that Python's setuptools works well for
relatively simple extensions on supported platforms, but beyond that
you have to hack.
Either that or we finally get around to implementing loadable modules .
Longer term that would be ideal, as you wouldn't have to rebuild
Python itself for every C extension module you wanted to use. There's
also the simplifying requirement that Python extension module foo.so
must define an initialization function initfoo().
However, I think a bigger advantage to implementing dynamic module
loading for Python on Plan 9 would be that you could then use the new
"ctypes" foreign function library recently introduced w/ Python 2.5
which allows you to wrap C libraries in pure Python, dispensing w/
tedious boiler-plate wrapping C code--at the expense of some
type-safety. ;)
John
