[Cython] Multiple modules in one compilation unit

[Stefan Behnel]

Dag Sverre Seljebotn, 02.03.2011 16:37:
> On 03/02/2011 04:11 PM, Lisandro Dalcin wrote:
>> On 2 March 2011 08:35, Stefan Behnel<stefan_ml at behnel.de> wrote:
>>> Dag Sverre Seljebotn, 02.03.2011 11:54:
>>>> Problem is that Fortran code often has...interesting...programming
>>>> practices. Global variables abound, and are often initialised between
>>>> modules. Imagine:
>>>>
>>>> settings_mod.set_alpha(0.34)
>>>> print compute_mod.get_alpha_squared()
>>>>
>>>> This behaves quite differently with two static versions rather than one...
>>> Then I'd suggest always linking dynamically.
>>>
>> And where are you going to put your fortran shared libraries? Dynamic
>> linking details varies wildly across platforms... I'm very much
>> understand Dag's use case and concerns, and I do think that some
>> research in all this is worth it.
>
> I'm not sure if there's much more to research at the moment -- Stefan says
> it is possible, and that's what I wanted to know at this stage. If I want
> it, I obviously need to implement it myself. (And if such a patch
> implements PEP 3121 and there's a demonstrated need for it with some users,
> I really can't see it getting rejected just out of it being in "poor taste").
>
> I.e., I'm going to make Fwrap spit out multiple pyx files and worry about
> this later. If multiple .pyx in one .so was fundamentally impossible, I
> might have gone another route with Fwrap. That was all.

The feature I could imagine becoming part of Cython is "compiling 
packages". I.e. you'd call "cython" on a package and it would output a 
directory with a single __init__.so that contains the modules compiled from 
all .pyx/.py files in that package. Importing the package would then 
trigger an import of that __init__.so, which in turn will execute code in 
its init__init__() function to register the other modules.

Would that work for you?

Stefan