[Python-Dev] Python equivalents in stdlib Was: Include datetime.py in stdlib or not?

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:39:38 +0100
Michael Foord <fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:
> On 07/07/2010 16:29, Alexander Belopolsky wrote:
> > [snip...]
> >
> >> 4. Does not ctypes make it possible to replace a method of a Python-coded
> >> class with a faster C version, with something like
> >>   try:
> >>     connect to methods.dll
> >>     check that function xyx exists
> >>     replace Someclass.xyy with ctypes wrapper
> >>   except: pass
> >> For instance, the SequenceMatcher heuristic was added to speedup the
> >> matching process that I believe is encapsulated in one O(n**2) or so
> >> bottleneck method. I believe most everything else is O(n) bookkeeping.
> >>
> >>      
> > The ctypes modules is very CPython centric as far as I know.   For the
> > new modules, this may be a valid way to rapidly develop accelerated
> > versions.   For modules that are already written in C, I don't see
> > much benefit in replacing them with ctypes wrappers.
> 
> Nope, both IronPython and PyPy have ctypes implementations and Jython is 
> in the process of "growing" one. Using ctypes for C extensions is the 
> most portable way of providing C extensions for Python (other than 
> providing a pure-Python implementation of course).

Except that ctypes doesn't help provide C extensions at all. It only
helps provide wrappers around existing C libraries, which is quite a
different thing.
Which, in the end, makes the original suggestion meaningless.

Regards

Antoine.