Dan Stromberg, 27.08.2011 21:58:
On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 1:58 AM, Nadeem Vawda wrote:
On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 5:52 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
It's acceptable for the Python version to use ctypes in the case of
wrapping an existing library, but the Python version should still
exist.
I'm not too sure about that - PEP 399 explicitly says that using ctypes
is
frowned upon, and doesn't mention anywhere that it should be used in this
sort of situation.
Note to self: do not comment on python-dev at 2 am, as one's ability
to read PEPs correctly apparently suffers :)
Consider my comment withdrawn, you're quite right that PEP 399
actually says this is precisely the case where an exemption is a
reasonable idea. Although I believe it's likely that PyPy will wrap it
with ctypes anyway :)
I'd like to better understand why ctypes is (sometimes) frowned upon.
Is it the brittleness? Tendency to segfault?
Maybe unwieldy code and slow execution on CPython?
Note that there's a ctypes backend for Cython being written as part of a
GSoC, so it should eventually become possible to write C library wrappers
in Cython and have it generate a ctypes version to run on PyPy. That,
together with the IronPython backend that is on its way, would give you a
way to write fast wrappers for at least three of the major four Python
implementations, without sacrificing readability or speed in one of them.
Stefan
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