On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 7:50 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net> wrote: > On Wed, 11 Mar 2015 17:27:58 +0000 > Brett Cannon <br...@python.org> wrote: >> >> Did anyone ever step forward to do this? I'm a bit worried about the >> long-term viability of ctypes if we don't have a maintainer or at least >> someone making sure we are staying up-to-date with upstream libffi. The >> ctypes module is a dangerous thing, so having a chunk of C code that isn't >> being properly maintained seems to me to make it even more dangerous. > > Depends what you call "dangerous". C code doesn't rot quicker than pure > Python code :-) Also, libffi really offers a wrapper around platform > ABIs, which rarely change.
And yet, lesser known ABIs in libffi contain bugs (as we discovered trying to work there with anything else than x86 really). Also there *are* ABI differencies that change slowly over time (e.g. requiring stack to be 16 byte aligned) > >> I'm going to propose a somewhat controversial idea: let's deprecate the >> ctypes module. > > This is gratuitous. I'm +1 on deprecating ctypes > >> We now have things like cffi and Cython for people who need >> to interface with C code. Both of those projects are maintained. And they >> are not overly difficult to work with. > > But they are not ctypes. For example, cffi wouldn't be obvious to use > for interfacing with non-C code, since it requires you to write C-like > declarations. You mean like Fortran? Or what precisely? > I don't understand why cffi would be safer than ctypes. At least not in > the operation mode where it doesn't need to invoke a C compiler. > Cython is a completely different beast, it requires a separate > compilation pass which makes it useless in some situations. > Our main motivation for "safer" is "comes with less magic and less gotchas", which also means "does less stuff". It's also smaller. _______________________________________________ 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
