On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 11:29 PM, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldousso...@mac.com>wrote:
> > On 26 Feb, 2013, at 16:13, Maciej Fijalkowski <fij...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Hello. > > > > I would like to discuss on the language summit a potential inclusion > > of cffi[1] into stdlib. > > The API in general looks nice, but I do have some concens w.r.t. including > cffi in the stdlib. > > 1. Why is cffi completely separate from ctypes, instead of layered on top > of it? That is, add a utility module to ctypes that can parse C > declarations and generate the right ctypes definitions. > > 2. Cffi has a dependencies on pycparser and that module and its > dependencies would therefore also be added to the stdlib (even if they'd be > hidden in the cffi package) > > 3. Cffi basicly contains a (limited) C parser, and those are notoriously > hard to get exactly right. Luckily cffi only needs to interpret > declarations and not the full language, but even so this can be a risk of > subtle bugs. > pycparser has been around for more than 4 years and is pretty stable. I know that it's been used to parse Windows headers, Linux system headers and other "scary" things for a C parser to handle. It's only known problem has to do with over-creative abuses of C's context sensitivity: http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/05/02/the-context-sensitivity-of-c%E2%80%99s-grammar-revisited/ In practice it doesn't come up often, and almost never in declarations, which is the subset cffi uses pycparser for. Eli
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