PEP 451 (import API refactoring) and C extension loading
Eric Snow's PEP 451 that refactors the import plugin API to move more boilerplate responsibility to the import system has come along nicely, and is now almost certain to make the beta 1 deadline. One of the guiding elements of that design has been the discussion we had a while ago on this list about making more information available to C extensions about how they're being loaded - the ModuleSpec objects in PEP 451 are a key piece in fulfilling that goal. However, I'm *not* confident it's going to be possible to work through all the issues involved in actually refactoring the dynamic loading infrastructure to use the new plugin model in the time we have left before feature freeze, particularly since getting the code aspects of PEP 451 completely bedded down is going to take some time (e.g. it opens up additional possibilities for the runpy API), and there are several other things that still need to happen prior to the beta (like getting ensurepip committed and completing the follow-on work). So, here's my current thinking: the PEP 451 refactoring makes it far more feasible to experiment with alternative C extension loading techniques through cffi, so I'd like to postpone actually changing the default extension loading system to Python 3.5. The idea of adding cffi itself to the standard library has been discussed, in which case we might even be able to move all of that ugly extension management code out of C and into Python permanently, rather than just as part of third party experiments. Thoughts? (cc'ing Stefan directly, since Cython is the most likely venue for such experiments) Regards, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia
Nick Coghlan, 02.11.2013 16:53:
That's a funny idea. Doesn't sound completely infeasible at first sight, cffi is all about shared library loading.
cffi itself would then have to be statically linked in, obviously. And be available on all platforms that CPython currently supports. Stefan
Nick Coghlan, 02.11.2013 16:53:
That's a funny idea. Doesn't sound completely infeasible at first sight, cffi is all about shared library loading.
cffi itself would then have to be statically linked in, obviously. And be available on all platforms that CPython currently supports. Stefan
participants (2)
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Nick Coghlan -
Stefan Behnel