[Numpy-discussion] Should we drop support for "one file" compilation mode?

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Mon, 5 Oct 2015 15:26:17 -0700
Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> For a long time, NumPy has supported two different ways of being compiled:
> 
> "Separate compilation" mode: like most C projects, each .c file gets
> compiled to a .o file, and then the .o files get linked together to
> make a shared library. (This has been the default since 1.8.0.)
> 
> "One file" mode: first concatenate all the .c files together to make
> one monster .c file, and then compile that .c file to make a shared
> library. (This was the default before 1.8.0.)
> 
[...]
> 
> There are some rumors that "one file" mode might be needed on some
> obscure platform somewhere, or that it might be necessary for
> statically linking numpy into the CPython executable, but we can't
> continue supporting things forever based only on rumors.

If those rumors were true, CPython would not even be able to build
(the _io module in 3.x is linked from several C object files, for
example).

Regards

Antoine.