On 10 April 2014 20:30, Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net> wrote: > FWIW, I do hope there would be a PEP before including CFFI... Actually I > don't understand what would justify an exemption.
I agree. I'd like to see a clear explanation of what advantages (and disadvantages!) CFFI gives over ctypes, as well as the plan for inclusion and how the inevitable confusion over whether to use ctypes or cffi will be handled. The fact that cffi requires bringing in ply and a vendored-but-not-public copy of pycparser, seems to imply to me that there's a lot of cost and I'd like to understand the gains. That's not to say that adding ply to the standard library mightn't be worth it in its own right, but there are a lot of other parsers out there, and I'd rather we blessed one as "best of breed" rather than "because cffi uses it". In particular, my understanding is that in order to get the key benefits of cffi (API compatibility rather than ABI) you need to include some sort of complex "generate and compile C" step in your project's build. That implies that using cffi requires building separate wheels for each Python version (as with any C extension) and having a C compiler to do the build. There are a lot of projects that I know of (particularly wrappers for Windows APIs like Colorama and pyreadline) migrating to ctypes precisely because they get a pure Python solution that doesn't need binary builds or version-dependent distributions. Those projects won't presumably be migrating to cffi. Also, a key area where ctypes is used seems to be the Windows API - and there, ABI compatibility for Windows APIs is the norm so the advantage of only needing API compatibility is minimal at best. At the moment, I see no real reason to add cffi to the stdlib - it certainly isn't an "obvious" decision to do so. This seems like clear PEP territory. Paul _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
