On Tue, 18 Dec 2018 at 22:34, M.-A. Lemburg <mal@egenix.com> wrote:
Hi Viktor,
please do consider the fact that the "Limited ABI" has essentially failed to meet expectations. It's hardly used and not really needed anymore.
This simply isn't true - the last time this was asserted, the SIP developers pointed out that PyQT binary extensions rely on the stable ABI to maintain compatibility across Python 3 versions, with only SIP itself needing to be recompiled each release.
Remember that we don't hear from happy users of a feature - we only hear from users for whom the feature is incomplete.
The main reason for the limited ABI was the desire to have extensions work without recompilation on system where access to compilers was difficult, mainly Windows at the time.
Err, no - it was so that folks didn't have to ship umpteen quadrillion versions of their binary extensions to support users on multiple different versions of Python.
It turns out that CPython's habit of embedding version numbers in filesystem paths causes additional problems in that regard, and the long life of Python 2.7 meant that folks were needing to build for at least Py2 and Py3 anyway, and hence the opportunity for simplification offered by the stable ABI was limited in practice.
Cheers, Nick.
-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia