On 27 February 2013 18:50, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
One other use case for the ABI level over the API level - the ABI level (no C extension) can be used across Python versions, where the API level needs a separate compiled extension per Python version. This can be a big deal on Windows at least, where users (not developers) with no compilers on their systems are common.
Is that still true for Windows even with the stable ABI and the dropping of narrow/wide Unicode builds?
Probably not, but I've never actually seen the stable ABI used in practice (and I don't know if cffi restricts itself to the stable ABI). I'm not sure that any toolchain (such as bdist_wininst or wheel) really supports it (in the sense that they tend to make the assumption that if there is a C extension, the code is version-specific). None of these are insurmountable problems, though. Paul.