[Python-Dev] CFFI released

[Armin Rigo]

Hi all,

We (=fijal and myself) finally released the beta-0.1 version of CFFI.

http://cffi.readthedocs.org/

It is a(nother) simple Foreign Function Interface for Python calling C
code.  I talked about it with a few python core people during the
PyCon sprint; now it's done, with a pure Python part and a compact
(but still 3000 lines) piece of C code.  The goal is for it to be
simple yet as complete as possible; it can be used in places where
ctypes (say) is not applicable or only with platform-specific
difficulties, e.g. to rewrite a "_curses" module in pure Python, or
access the X libraries, etc.

Of course I'm not going to suggest that it should be part of the
standard library right now, but I do hope that over time, should it
prove useful and used, I could come back and make such a suggestion.
In any case it looks like we are going to write native and JITted PyPy
support for it, and change our pure Python "_ctypes" implementation to
be based on "cffi".  As it is much more compact to support than the
full _ctypes, it is also good for Jython and IronPython.


A bientôt,

Armin.