[Cython] Cython-ctypes branch

[Stefan Behnel]

Romain Guillebert, 18.10.2011 20:43:
> I'll try to do that this week, I agree that it's better to get this
> branch merged.

Cool.


> Rpython isn't suitable at all for this kind of use case because you have
> to recompile the entire PyPy executable each time you change a library
> (long compile time and big memory consumption), loading modules is not
> trivial, the entire program must be type-inferable (which probably isn't
> the case of most Cython programs), global variables are considered
> constants,

Yes, that's about the kind of hassle that I expected. I heard a couple of 
PyPy developers report that it's not really fun to write code in RPython.


> and I think (don't quote me) that the JIT doesn't work on
> rpython code.

Don't quote me either, but I think RPython basically *is* the JIT.


> I have no idea on the speedup/slowdown though.

That's secondary at best. The most important thing is to get it working, so 
that users can start to test their code against it. If it works out, it'll 
be a huge feature to be able to actually write code that is fast in both 
CPython and PyPy *and* that connects to external C code. Making it fast in 
PyPy is then up to them.

Stefan