[Pythonmac-SIG] What's MacPython missing?

[Bob Ippolito]

On Thursday, Oct 16, 2003, at 07:40 America/New_York, Michael Hudson 
wrote:

> Bob Ippolito <bob at redivi.com> writes:
>
>> I'm interested to know what people here would like to see for 
>> MacPython.
>> 	Which modules from other platforms would you really like to see?
>> 	Which Apple APIs/Frameworks would you like to use but aren't
>> 	wrapped or aren't wrapped satisfactorily?
>> 	What documentation do you think needs to be written/improved
>> 	(specifically)?
>>
>> These are a few of the things I'm interested in:
> [...]
>> 	An optimized PPC backend for Psyco (I'm kind of working on
>> 	this on and off.. at the PPC ASM compiler/decompiler stage)
>
> Hey, me too!  Armin was of the opinion that this would be seriously
> hard (i.e. about as hard as writing psyco for x86 was) until psyco is
> ready to become part of PyPy, though.

I think having all those extra registers around, and the fact that most 
of the operations take a destination and two operands instead of just 
dest and src, might make it a bit nicer.  But then again, the fact that 
Psyco was designed for x86 might mean that it would be hard to take 
advantage of.  I really don't know, it's been a while since I've looked 
at the source.

> [...]
>> 	A smarter version of bgen or something bgen-like that was more
>> 	generic about the kind of C it could understand, and more
>> 	modern about the wrappers it spit out (keyword arguments, new
>> 	style types with initializers, etc).  Potentially it could
>> 	even preserve documentation from the original code, it would
>> 	be relatively straightforward to do that with most (new?)
>> 	Apple headers.  Maybe even a version that spit out ctypes
>> 	wrappers instead.
>
> Do you know anything concrete about gcc-xml?

I know that it's a real bitch to compile on OS X (but I did).. it's 
very odd.  It must work to some degree because Pyste uses it, but I 
haven't taken a serious look at the output.  It seems like one of those 
XML formats where you need to write a pretty significant translator 
from it to a data structure worth using.

-bob