[Armin Rigo Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 09:10:55PM +0200]
Hello Holger,
On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 07:16:14AM +0200, holger krekel wrote:
After some discussions especially with Armin i now think that we should promote as a goal to
dynamically tie into/adapt arbritrary C-Libraries and operation system calls.
You and me discussed this at EuroPython, but I expressed the thought that this could be *one* of the various ambitious goals of the project. Using libffi or some other custom machinery to call native C libraries directly from Python is one step (though you can already do that with ctypes, as you mentioned). It is true that it is probably easier and cleaner to do it with PyPy because we control low-level code emission much more closely; some more hacking could probably get us rid of glibc altogether.
Getting rid of glibc is a neat idea, but all the other goals that we discussed in pypy-dev and on the sprints are also important in other respects and should not be disregarded if we want to promote PyPy as a "software platform". I, for example, tend to attach a lot of value to the interpreter's great flexibility as an experimentation platform. Others want to make object spaces with slightly or heavily customized semantics, dream to plug-and-play their own syntax, or just build lightweight versions of Python. All these goals together are what make a great and ambitious project !
Well put! Actually i didn't mean to suddenly reduce the number of goals/dreams to just one. Then again, i specifically put C/system-call trampolins under "EU-funding" because i think connecting a high-level language like python directly to the kernel-level or C-libraries feels (to me) more like a "software platform" than a nice language with a nice flexible interpreter (which is nevertheless the pre-condition for c/sys trampolin integration, isn't it?). Speaking of EU-Funding. Should we setup a mailing-list for information exchange and discussion? If we are to really go for the October 15th deadline then we should start to rush or don't go for it this year (IMHO). cheers, holger