[Armin Rigo Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 03:05:52PM +0100]
Hello Holger,
On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 01:22:55AM +0100, holger krekel wrote:
(...) IMO the complexity of (and dependency on) C source generators could be reduced this way.
Ok. But we must keep all doors open by expressing things abstractedly, like defining classes for C function description. By default, in the "no-op down-translation" obtained by running the Python-in-Python code over CPython, the actual calls are implemented with ctypes.
Maybe not even that for starters.
Everything that forces a particular down-translation is bad, even if that particular down-translation seems good.
I am not sure i understand what you mean here. What i am aiming at is something like the following set of restriction for implementing the pypy-python-interpreter: - no nested scopes - simple function calls preferably with no arguments - no list comprehension - no generators - no += *= and friends - global namespace contains only immutable objects - very explicit names: always do e.g. 'self.valuestack.pop()' instead of 'self.pop()' Of course the pypy-interpreter needs to provide all python features to its higher-level python code. But if we follow the above restrictions (and maybe some more) then we might - for example - easily inline the 'bytecode interpretation functions' by transforming instance attribute lookups ('self.valuestack.pop') to LOAD_FAST/STORE_FAST style lookups. IMO It's very comfortable to have a version which is verified to run on CPython (and Jython while we are at it) but can be used for the next (generational) steps.
I can think of other cases where we will need a description of C function signatures but not the code that actually call them, e.g. Psyco (for which it will be useful to have some other information as well, like "does the C function have side-effects").
Sure, although the descriptions might not be accurate if they are not actually used. I explicititely don't think that the pypy-interpreter should require ctypes. So I don't think we are contradicting each other, are we? greetings, holger