On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 4:18 AM, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren@mac.com> wrote:
On 27 Feb, 2013, at 10:06, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 9:29 AM, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren@mac.com> wrote:
On 26 Feb, 2013, at 16:13, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello.
I would like to discuss on the language summit a potential inclusion of cffi[1] into stdlib.
The API in general looks nice, but I do have some concens w.r.t. including cffi in the stdlib.
1. Why is cffi completely separate from ctypes, instead of layered on top of it? That is, add a utility module to ctypes that can parse C declarations and generate the right ctypes definitions.
Because ctypes API is a mess and magic. We needed a cleaner (and much smaller) model.
The major advantages of starting over is probably that you can hide the complexity and that opens opportunities for optimizations. That said, I'm not convinced that ctypes is unnecessarily complex.
cffi actually does have a ctypes backend in addition to the ffi and "compile a CPython extension" backends. But the ctypes backend is guaranteed to be slow and messy because it is ctypes.