[Python-Dev] PEP 384 status

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Wed Sep 1 14:43:34 CEST 2010


On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 8:42 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> After all, we don't usually try to workaround platform-specific
> bugs (not as a low level such as the C API level); at worse, we mention
> their existence in the docs.

You persist in viewing the allowance of multiple C runtimes in a
single process as a bug instead of a feature. This comes from the
monolithic approach to software management in Unix systems (with the
associated web of dependencies and implications for backwards
compatibility management). The Windows heritage is different, allowing
each application to be largely independent of everything other than
the OS itself, so the execution model is also different.

Windows is a supported platform for Python and to meet the promise of
a stable ABI, we need to support multiple C runtimes in a single
process. Since we aren't in the habit of passing low level objects
around, the number of APIs affected is relatively tiny (the current
tally is less than half a dozen that I know of - the two mentioned in
this thread, plus a couple of of the PyRun_* APIs).

There will be some cases (like file descriptors) where we just say
"don't do that" but those should be fairly rare.

Cheers,
Nick.

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


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