[Python-Dev] cffi in stdlib

[Maciej Fijalkowski]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 11:18 AM, Ronald Oussoren
<ronaldoussoren at mac.com> wrote:
>
> On 27 Feb, 2013, at 10:06, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 9:29 AM, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 26 Feb, 2013, at 16:13, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hello.
>>>>
>>>> I would like to discuss on the language summit a potential inclusion
>>>> of cffi[1] into stdlib.
>>>
>>> The API in general looks nice, but I do have some concens w.r.t. including cffi in the stdlib.
>>>
>>> 1. Why is cffi completely separate from ctypes, instead of layered on top of it? That is, add a utility module to ctypes that can parse C declarations and generate the right ctypes definitions.
>>
>> Because ctypes API is a mess and magic. We needed a cleaner (and much
>> smaller) model.
>
> The major advantages of starting over is probably that you can hide the complexity and that opens opportunities for optimizations. That said, I'm not convinced that ctypes is unnecessarily complex.

I implemented ctypes. It is.

>>> 4. And finally a technical concern: how well does cffi work with fat binaries on OSX? In particular, will the distutils support generate cached data for all architectures supported by a fat binary?
>>
>> no idea.
>
> That's somehting that will have to be resolved before cffi can be included in the stdlib, fat binaries are supported by CPython and are used the binary installers.
>
> Ronald

if cpython supports it and you can load it using dlopen, it does work
then (it really is just building a C extension on the API level).