[Python-Dev] Addition of "pyprocessing" module to standard lib.

[Thomas Heller]

Martin v. Löwis schrieb:
>> As said before, PyOpenGL is an example of an extension that moved from C
>> code to Python/ctypes, luckily we don't use it, but what if the
>> maintainers of MySQL-Python or cx_Oracle decide to move to ctypes.
>> Having the ctypes extension in the stdlib doesn't imply it runs on any
>> platform where python runs. Extension writers should keep this in mind
>> when they decide to use ctypes. They should document, that their
>> extension depends on ctypes and therefore doesn't run on platforms where
>> ctypes doesn't work.
> 
> Plus, even if ctypes works, the code might be incorrect, because they
> had been assuming structure layouts and symbolic constants that have
> just a different definition on some other platform, causing the
> extension module to crash.
> 
> Writing portable ctypes modules is really hard - significantly harder
> than writing portable C code (although writing non-portable ctypes
> code is apparently easier than writing non-portable C code).

I would say that writing portable C code is hard as well, aren't there
just more tools that help?

Thomas