On 20 Feb, 2007, at 10:47, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
The other area where I expected to hear wailing and gnashing of teeth is users compiling with third-party extensions that haven't been updated to a Py_ssize_t API and still use longs. I would have expected some instability due to the size mismatches in function signatures -- the difference would only show- up with giant sized data structures -- the bigger they are, the harder they fall. OTOH, there have not been any compliants either -- I would have expected someone to submit a patch to pyport.h that allowed a #define to force Py_ssize_t back to a long so that the poster could make a reliable build that included non-updated third-party extensions.
Maybe that's because most sane 64-bit systems use LP64 and therefore don't have any problems with mixing Py_ssize_t and long. AFAIK Windows is the only major platform that doesn't use the LP64 model and 64-bit windows isn't used a lot. Ronald