GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[Terry Reedy]

On 6/12/2010 3:21 AM, Martin v. Loewis wrote:
>> Yeah. I get the policy in general, a proliferation of ctypes stuff could
>> be very bad -- but if code is very careful with type-checking and stuff,
>> it should be possible to get an exception, I'd hope.
>
> Only if you can live with the respective module not being available all
> the time.
>
> The issue is not that you may mistakes in the ctypes code, thus allowing
> users to crash Python. The issue is that if users remove ctypes (which
> they may want to do because it's not trustworthy), then your module will
> stop working (unless you have a fallback for the case that ctypes is
> unavailable).
>
> In general, it's undesirable that absence of some module causes a
> different module to stop working in the standard library, except that
> absence of Tkinter clearly causes IDLE and turtle to stop working.

Having the absence of ctypes causing IDLE and turtle to stop working 
would not be any worse, in a sense, though probably less expected.

>> Otherwise it makes certain windows-workarounds very problematic. You
>> basically /have/ to write a C extension :|
>
> That's not problematic at all, for the standard library. Just write that
> C extension.

I suppose one could develop in ctypes and then rewrite when 'stable', 
though 'stable' seldom is.

Would it be possible to write a program that converts a module that uses 
ctypes to interface to a dll to a corresponding C extension program that 
would compile to a drop in replacement extension module?

Given that the latter tends to be faster (as discovered/claimed by the 
pygame folks), this might prove useful for more than the specific case.

Terry Jan Reedy