[Python-Dev] API bloat

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Wed, 09 Feb 2011 14:13:11 -0000
exarkun at twistedmatrix.com wrote:
> >And, since the C API has never been anywhere near as tightly
> >controlled as the language definition, alternative implementations are
> >going to garner more sympathy if they restrict their concerns to the
> >growth of the stable ABI rather than worrying about an implementation
> >detail of CPython.
> 
> Sympathy, perhaps.  But that doesn't mean people will drop everything 
> and rewrite their extension modules.

Using the stable ABI should have maintenance advantages, since you
don't have to compile a separate package for each Python version.
How far distutils goes to support version-independent binary
distributions I don't know, though. But at least the stable ABI is a
step in that direction.

And of course you don't need to "rewrite your extension modules".
Apparently type definitions have to be adapted, and you have to make
sure you aren't using functions that are not in the limited API, but
otherwise things should work fine.

Regards

Antoine.