On 08/05/2011 01:31 AM, Robert Bradshaw wrote:
This is getting a bit OT but is worth discussing, so I'm starting a new thread.
On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 2:51 PM, Greg Ewing<greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
Dag Sverre Seljebotn wrote:
- One idea is coercion of C pointers to ctypes Python objects and back
again.
Some way of requesting this manually might be useful, but
I don't think I'd like it to happen automatically. Slinging
raw pointers around in Python isn't something to be done
lightly -- even if all the code that dereferences it is
in Cython, there are problems with managing the lifetime
of whatever it references.
You know, C has the same problem with slinging around raw pointers and
managing their lifetimes :). Of course, with C, the user is all to
painfully aware of the situation.
I think this would be most useful for providing data from Python (even
an interactive prompt) to a Cython module. I agree about it being
dangerous to do implicitly, but something explicit like
def entry_point(ctypes.CData x):
cdef double* result = func(<int*>x)
return<ctypes.CData>result # or cytpes.CData(result,
option=...) to control deallocation
could be really nice. Maybe CData could even be parameterized.
This doesn't let you write
cpdef int func(int *a): ...
though. My motivation for this was mainly to remove an exception from
the rules, and make sure that every C level object .
Although, C++ classes are another gaping exception to the rules. Perhaps
just allowing the extension to 'cpdef' above but instead generate a stub
that always raises a TypeError for the 'def' version is a better idea?
That would allow fetching the docstring etc. from Python space, while
the function remains uncallable. Even if we get int*<->ctypes.pointer, I
propose this idea for C++ classes.
But I can also see that it'd be really handy if you, say, have a huge
API wrapped with ctypes, and want to gradually and piecewise move over
to Cython. Or do some low-level integration between a ctypes wrapper and
Cython wrapper.
What's ctypes.CData? It's not in my ctypes module...
Dag Sverre
_______________________________________________
cython-devel mailing list
cython-devel@python.org
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/cython-devel
