[python-committers] Call For Participants For The 2016 Python Language Summit

[Nick Coghlan]

On 3 March 2016 at 21:26, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2016-03-02 2:01 GMT+01:00 Larry Hastings <larry at hastings.org>:
>> The purpose of the event is to disseminate information and spark
>> conversation among Python core developers.  It's our once-a-year chance to
>> get together and hash out where we're going and what we're doing,
>> face-to-face.
>
> Sadly, I don't plan to attend Pycon US 2016 (one of the reasons is
> that my talk on FAT Python was not accepted, but it's not the only
> reason).
>
> But it would be nice if we can open a discussion on the Python C API.
> I understood that it's a major blocker issue for PyPy. It's probably
> also a major issue for IronPython and Jython. Since Pyston & Pyjion
> are based on CPython, it may impact them less, but it's probably still
> an annoyance to reach *best* performances.
>
> I would be nice to discuss how to move to a new C API which doesn't
> expose implementation details and discuss if libraries will move to it
> or not. Implementation "details": GIL, reference counting, C
> structures like PyObject, etc.

Adding cffi (including its dependencies) to the standard library was
approved-in-principle a couple of years ago, and I believe the one
technical issue with a lack of support for ahead-of-time compilation
of the extension module has since been addressed, so as far as I know
that just needs a champion to actually work through the details of
getting it added via the PEP process.

I'm also not aware of any explicit documentation of the underlying FFI
from a C API/ABI perspective, which is what would be needed for tools
like SWIG and Cython to support it as an alternative to the full
CPython API.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia