[Python-Dev] PEP 384 status

[Adal Chiriliuc]

On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 1:42 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> What I think would be a mistake would be to define the API in terms of
> Windows-specific quirks. All this discussion seems bent on satisfying
> the needs of Windows developers at the expense of non-Windows
> developers. "FILE*" is a perfectly standard C feature (and a
> widely-used one at that). If Windows doesn't handle it correctly then
> it's a Windows issue and we shouldn't annoy other people by refusing
> access to that feature.

As an alternative the stable ABI could use the native system file
handle instead of FILE*. HANDLE (returned by CreateFile) on Windows
and int (returned by open) on Linux (or even FILE*).

The extension writer would have to write it's own abstraction over
this. Python could provide a default wrapper (as a sample).
Unfortunately you would also lose the buffering provided by fopen
(unless the sample also does this).

As a side note, I wrote a plugin for a big Windows application
(Mastercam) once. There were at least 5 different CRTs running in that
process - 3 different release versions and 2 different debug versions.
Besides a few other statically linked into other plugin DLLs. This is
quite common, especially since you can have foreign CRTs injected into
your process by various shell extensions like TortoiseSVN.