Hi:
EXPY (http://expy.sourceforge.net/) is an express way to extend Python.
Why consider expy? Here are some good reasons:
(I). WYSIWYG. The expy project enables you to write your module in Python the
way your extension would be (WYSIWYG), and meanwhile write your implementation
in pure C. You specify your modules, functions, methods, classes, and even
their documentations the usual way of writing your Python correspondences. Then
provide your implementation to the functions/methods by returning a multi-line
string. By such an arrangement, everything falls in its right place, and your
extension code becomes easy to read and maintain. Also, the generated code is
very human-friendly.
(II). You only provide minimal information to indicate your intension of how
your module/class would function in Python. So your extension is largely
independent from the Python extension API. As your interaction with the Python
extension API is reduced to minimal (you only care about the functionality and
logic), it is then possible that your module written in expy can be independent
of changes in the extension API.
(III). The building and setup of your project can be automatically done with
the distutil tool. In the tutorial, there are ample examples on how easily this
is achieved.
(IV). Very light weight. The expy tool is surprisingly light weight dispite of
its powerful ability, as it is written in pure Python. There is no parser or
compiler for code generation, but rather the powerful reflexion mechanism of
Python is exploited in a clever way to generate human-friendly codes.
Currently, generating code in C is supported, however, the implementation is
well modularized and code generation in other languages such as Java and C++
should be easy.
Currently, EXPY/CXPY works with Python 2.5, 2.6. I haven’t tested with Python
2.7 or 3.x (for 3.x, need to use the code tool first, and I am not sure if the
C API for 3.x has changed much, if you happen to try it out, let me know what
happened).
While there are already a couple of other projects trying to simply this task
with different strategies, such as Cython, Pyrex and modulator, this project is
unique and charming in its own way. All you need is the WYSIWYG Python file for
your module extension, then expy takes care of everything else. What follows in
this documentation is on how to extend Python in C using expy-cxpy: the module
expy helps define your module, while module cxpy helps generate C codes for
your defined module.
Yingjie
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