On 31 Jul 2018, at 15:36, Victor Stinner <vstinner@redhat.com> wrote:
2018-07-31 14:57 GMT+02:00 Jeroen Demeyer <J.Demeyer@ugent.be>:
Source compatibility between Python releases: the source code compiles and works the same way on all Python versions (above a certain minimum version).
Don't we already provide source compatibility with the current API?
That correct, for the documented public API. The header files expose more and those bits are used by some extensions (and do change at times, which is fine because there is no stability guarantee).
But then: why change the public C API at all? Changing the API has a cost for users of the API, and should IMHO only be done when there is a clear benefit for doing so. The current project website is vague on the benefits of a new API (why should I spend time on porting my code to the new API?). Keep in mind that there are a lot of users of the CPython API, not all of which are on PyPI.
Ronald