On 2018-11-29, Armin Rigo wrote:
...Also, although I'm discussing it here, I think the whole approach would be better if done as a third-party extension for now, without requiring changes to CPython---just use the existing C API to implement the CPython version.
Hello Armin,
Thank you for providing your input on this subject. I too like the idea of an API "shim layer" as a separate project.
What do you think of writing the shim layer in C++? I'm not a C++ programmer but my understanding is that modern C++ compilers are much better than years ago. Using C++ would allow us to provide a higher level API with smaller runtime costs. However, it would require that any project using the shim layer would have to be compiled with a C++ compiler (CPython and PyPy could still expose a C compatible API).
Perhaps it is a bad idea. If someone does create such a shim layer, it will already be challenging to convince extension authors to move to it. If it requires them to switch to using a C++ compiler rather than a C compiler, maybe that's too much effort. OTOH, with C++ I think you could do things like use smart pointers to automatically handle refcounts on the handles. Or maybe we should just skip C++ and implement the layer in Rust. Then the Rust borrow checker can handle the refcounts. ;-)
Regards,
Neil