[Cython] Cython-ctypes branch

[Robert Bradshaw]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 12:10 PM, Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml at behnel.de> wrote:
> 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.

Thanks!

>> 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.

+1. The primary benefit I see is being able to write modules that
interact with external C code that works in both CPython and PyPy
which would be a boon to both our communities. The fact that we're
both interested in speed is not as big of a deal on this front, and I
have no concerns that it will work itself out.

- Robert