On Thu, 3 Mar 2016 at 10:40 Antoine Pitrou <antoine@python.org> wrote:
Le 03/03/2016 19:38, Brett Cannon a écrit :
Ignoring the potential to crash the interpreter (I personally don't care but some do), is the maintenance issue we have with ctypes (or at least that's my hang-up with it). I think we still have not figured out what code we have patched and so no one has been willing to update to a newer version of libffi. I think Zachary looked into it and got some distance but never far enough to feel comfortable with trying to update things.
But I thought CFFI's ABI in-line solution matched what ctypes did?
I think it does more or less, which is why precisely I would find it gratuitous to deprecate ctypes.
As for the maintenance problem, ok, but we might end up with the same problems with cffi (both rely on libffi after all).
Personally, if I got my way we would deprecate ctypes in the stdlib and give it to the community to maintain (but in situations like this I rarely get my way :). We would then keep CFFI externally and just make sure that any new C API we developed makes sense for use by CFFI.
And another idea I had for some new-fangled C API: no macros. That gives us a better ABI and it also makes AST analysis easier with tools like clang-analyzer.