[Python-Dev] CFFI released

[Terry Reedy]

On 6/18/2012 5:29 PM, Armin Rigo wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 9:10 PM, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com> wrote:
 >> Me
>>> Make cffi less buggy (check the tracker for new test cases ;-), faster
>>> (closer to swig type wrappers), and easier to use than ctypes, and I am sure
>>> there will be interest.
>>
>> I would say it's already fulfilling those three, but I suppose you should
>> try for yourself.



> I don't think the first is fulfilled so far, as we found various
> issues on various Linux and non-Linux platforms (and fixed them, so I
> suppose that release 0.1.1 is coming soon).  But I agree with Fijal
> about speed and ease of use.  Like SWIG it generates wrappers in the
> form of a CPython C extension with built-in functions, so I suppose
> the performance is similar to SWIG and not ctypes.  Well, SWIG
> wrappers typically have custom logic written in C, whereas in cffi
> this logic is typically written as Python code, so I suppose it ends
> up being slower (on CPython; on PyPy small wrapping functions are
> inlined and have little cost).  But the same argument can be pushed
> further to "why did you use a slow language like Python to write your
> app in the first place", which I hope we agree is bogus :-)

Yes, because languages have no speed, only implementations do; and yes,
because when CPython really is too slow for a particular task, it can be 
pushed onto C. But some people (pygame, others on python-list) have 
reported that for their project, ctypes negates too much of the C 
speedup, relative to swig or similar. So it has not been quite the C 
wrapper generator killer that some people hoped for. (This is not to say 
that is not great for uses it does succeed at.)

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy