On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 12:35 PM, Terry Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu> wrote: > Yes, because languages have no speed, only implementations do; and yes, > because when CPython really is too slow for a particular task, it can be > pushed onto C. But some people (pygame, others on python-list) have reported > that for their project, ctypes negates too much of the C speedup, relative > to swig or similar. So it has not been quite the C wrapper generator killer > that some people hoped for. (This is not to say that is not great for uses > it does succeed at.)
There's also another reason ctypes hasn't taken over from Cython and SWIG: because it's entirely ABI based and doesn't look at the C header files, it loses even what little type safety C possesses. SWIG and Cython, on the other hand, suffer from the fact that you can't just decide to wrap an arbitrary DLL on the fly *without* predefining an extension module, and you also can't just use C syntax to define the ABI you want to access (although SWIG actually gets pretty close in many cases). The approach Armin and Maciej have chosen here (using C declarations to define the ABI, and supporting verification against the C headers as a separate step) looks very promising. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
