On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 20:54, Eric Snow <ericsnowcurrently@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 4:17 PM, Brett Cannon <brett@python.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 12:10, Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> wrote:

>> Strictly speaking, I do think you need to deprecate the APIs. I like
>> Nick's
>> suggestion to make them C wrappers which just call back into Python.
>
>
> That was my plan, but the amount of code it will take to wrap them is making
> me not care. =) For PyImport_GetMagicTag() I would need to expose a new
> attribute on sys or somewhere which specifies the VM name. For
> PyImport_GetMagicNumber() I have to do a bunch of bit twiddling to convert a
> bytes object into a long which I am just flat-out not in the mood to figure
> out how to do. And all of this will lead to the same amount of C code as
> there currently is for what is already implemented, so I just don't care
> anymore. =)

I thought I already (mostly) worked it all out in that patch on
issue13959. I felt really good about the approach for the magic tag
and magic bytes.

You didn't update Python/import.c in your patches so that the public C API continued to function. That's what is going to take a bunch of C code to continue to maintain, not the Python side of it.

Once find_module() and reload() are done in imp.py, I'm hoping to
follow up on a few things. That includes the unresolved mailing list
thread about sys.implementation (or whatever it was), which will help
with the magic tag. Anyway, I don't want to curtail the gutting of
import.c quite yet (as he hears cries of "bring out your dead!").

Even w/ all of that gutted, a decent chunk of coding is holding on to dear life thanks to PyImport_ExecCodeModuleObject() (and those that call it). IOW the C API as it is currently exposed is going to end up being the limiting factor of how many lines get deleted in the very end.

-eric

p.s. I understand your sentiment here, considering that mothers are
often exhausted by childbirth and the importlib bootstrap was a big
baby. You were in labor for, what, 6 years. <wink> [There's an
analogy that could keep on giving. :) ]