[Python-Dev] Language Summit notes

[Armin Rigo]

Hi,

On 10 April 2014 22:12, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree. I'd like to see a clear explanation of what advantages (and
> disadvantages!) CFFI gives over ctypes, as well as the plan for
> inclusion and how the inevitable confusion over whether to use ctypes
> or cffi will be handled.  (...)

I can't judge exactly what was told in the Language Summit, but here
is my own position about CFFI. Code-wise, we're in precisely the same
spot as last year.  The usage of CFFI seems to be growing a lot.
However, it's not in any stdlib-ready state right now.

Why not?  Because we have a plan to go forward and fix the main issues
people seem to be having: when used in "API mode" there is some
building-C-sources-and-compiling-them going on under your feet;
however, "explicit is better than implicit" seems to apply here too.
Thus, it seems that the basic model might be changed toward a variant
in which you put your C declarations into some separate file that you
need to execute once, in order to build and compile a regular C
extension module.

This would be superficial, but change the perception of CFFI to be "a
preprocessor that produces C extension modules".

This affects the "API mode" but not the "ABI mode" (which is basically
the same as ctypes, modulo the syntax).


A bientôt,

Armin.