On 30 Jan 2018, at 05:45, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
I'll also note that one of the things we (and others) *have* been putting quite a bit of time into is the question of "Why do people avoid using extension modules for code acceleration?".
I think that is simple. Those that try give up because its a difficult API to call correctly. At PYCON UK on speaker explain how she, PhD level researcher, had failed to get the a C extension working. I was contacted to improve PyCXX by a contractor for the US Army that stated that he was called in to help the internal developers get a big library wrapped for use from python. After 6 months they where no where near working code. He did what was needed with PyCXX in 3 weeks + the time getting me to make some nice additions to help him. It seems that if people find a C++ library that will do the heavy lifting they end up with extensions. But those that attempt the C API as is seem to fail and give up. It also seems that people do not go looking for the helper libraries. Next year at PYCON I hope to give a talk on PyCXX and encourage people to write extensions. Barry PyCXX maintainer.