Re: [Distutils] Best practices for optional C extensions

On 13 July 2013 14:14, Ben Darnell <ben@bendarnell.com> wrote:

I'd like to add a C extension to speed up a small bit of code in a package (Tornado), but make it optional both for compatibility with non-cpython implementations and for ease of installation on systems without a C compiler available. Ideally any user who runs "pip install tornado" on a system capable of compiling extensions would get the extensions; if this capability cannot be detected automatically I'd prefer the opt-out case to be the one that requires non-default arguments. Are there any packages that provide a good example to follow for this?

I believe that coverage has an optional C extension like this. Paul