[Python-Dev] Supporting Third Party Modules (was The other Py2.4 issue)

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Bob Ippolito wrote:
> Yes, of course, I was talking about the executable, not extensions.  On 
> Mac OS X 10.3+, the linker flag -undefined dynamic_lookup allows 
> extensions to link to no Python whatsoever.

It's the same on SysV ELF shared libraries, and in most other unices.

> The extensions will just 
> find the symbols it needs from some other image already loaded into the 
> process at runtime.  If it weren't for the "forced" ABI incompatibility, 
> we'd already have extensions that work cross-Python-major-version 
> (assuming they used a safe subset of functions and structures).

Are you talking about a forced ABI incompatibility, beyond the Windows
issue of linking with a specific pythonxy.dll?

On Unix, you certainly can have extensions across Python major versions.

Regards,
Martin