[Python-ideas] Exposing regular expression bytecode

[Paul Moore]

On 16 February 2016 at 06:04, Jonathan Goble <jcgoble3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello? Anyone? I'd really like to see this idea move forward, but I
> need some comments for that.

Sorry. I don't personally have any issue with the proposal, and it
sounds like a reasonable idea. I don't think it's likely to be
*hugely* controversial - although it will likely need a little care in
documenting the feature to ensure that we are clear that there's no
guarantees of backward compatibility that we don't want to commit to
on the newly - exposed data. And we should also ensure that by
exposing this information, we don't preclude changes such as the
incorporation of the regex module (I don't know if the regex module
has a bytecode implementation like the re module does).

The next step is probably simply to raise a tracker issue for this. I
know you said you have little C experience, but the big problem is
that it's unlikely that any of the core devs with C experience will
have the time or motivation to code up your idea. So without a working
patch, and someone willing and able to respond to comments on the
patch, it's not likely to progress.

But if you are willing to dig into Python's C API yourself (and it
sounds like you are) there are definitely people who will help you.
You might want to join the core mentorship list (see
http://pythonmentors.com/) where you should get plenty of assistance.
This proposal sounds like a great "beginner" task, as well - so even
if you don't want to implement it yourself, still put it on the
tracker, and mark it as an "easy" change, and maybe some other
newcomer who wants a task to help them learn the C API will pick it
up.

Hope that helps - thanks for the suggestion and sorry if it seems like
no-one was interested at first. It's an unfortunate fact of life
around here that things *do* take time to get people's interest. You
mention patience in one of your messages - that's definitely something
you'll need to cultivate, I'm afraid... :-)

Paul