Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall@gmail.com> wrote:
I would like to discuss on the language summit a potential inclusion of cffi[1] into stdlib. This is a project Armin Rigo has been working for a while, with some input from other developers.
I've tried cffi (admittedly only in a toy script) and find it very nice to use. Here's a comparison (pi benchmark) between wrapping libmpdec using a C-extension (_decimal), cffi and ctypes: +-------------------------------+----------+----------+---------+ | | _decimal | ctypes | cffi | +===============================+==========+==========+=========+ | cpython-tip (with-system-ffi) | 0.19s | 5.40s | 5.14s | +-------------------------------+----------+----------+---------+ | cpython-2.7 (with-system-ffi) | n/a | 4.46s | 5.18s | +-------------------------------+----------+----------+---------+ | Ubuntu-cpython-2.7 | n/a | 3.63s | - | +-------------------------------+----------+----------+---------+ | pypy-2.2.1-linux64 | n/a | 125.9s | 0.94s | +-------------------------------+----------+----------+---------+ | pypy3-2.1-beta1-linux64 | n/a | 264.9s | 2.93s | +-------------------------------+----------+----------+---------+ I guess the key points are that C-extensions are hard to beat and that cffi performance on pypy-2 is outstanding. Additionally it's worth noting that Ubuntu does something in their Python build that we should do, too. +1 for cffi in the stdlib. Stefan Krah