On 2 February 2018 at 06:15, Barry Scott <barry@barrys-emacs.org> wrote:
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.
Aye, indeed. That's a big part of why we've never had much motivation to fill in the "How to do this by hand" instructions on https://packaging.python.org/guides/packaging-binary-extensions/: it's so hard to get the refcounting and GIL manager right by hand that it's almost never the right answer vs either using a dedicated extension-module-writing language like Cython, or writing a normal shared external library and then using a wrapper generator like cffi/SWIG/milksnake, or using a helper library like PySIP/PyCXX/Boost to do the heavy lifting for you. So while wheels and conda have helped considerably with the cross-platform end user UX of extension modules, there's still a lot of work to be done around the publisher UX, both for existing publishers (to get more tools to work the way PySIP does and allow a single wheel build to target multiple Python versions), and for new publishers (to make the various extension module authoring tools easier to discover, rather than having folks assuming that handcrafted calls directly into the CPython C API is their only option). Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia