Guido van Rossum wrote:
On the other hand it breaks one of the most fundamental Python guidelines: if you get a core dump (segfault etc.) it's a bug in Python or in a 3rd party extension, not in *your* Python code. An exception would have to be made for any code that uses ctypes, as it is usually trivial to cause core dumps with ctypes (I'd venture it's hard to avoid them ;-).
I don't expect this to count against including ctypes; but I do want it to be dealt with somehow!
I think the strongest point *for* ctypes is the inclusion of dl in the source distribution, which has the very same flaws as ctypes in terms of crashability. So as for dealing with it "somehow": I would make ctypes a dynamically loaded module (ctypes.pyd), so administrators could remove it, and I could also make it a separate option in the Windows installer, so administrators could reject to install it. Regards, Martin