[Python-Dev] cffi in stdlib

[Maciej Fijalkowski]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 3:39 AM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> On 2/26/2013 10:13 AM, Maciej Fijalkowski wrote:
>
>> I would like to discuss on the language summit a potential inclusion
>> of cffi[1] into stdlib.
>
>
> How does it compare in terms of speed. One reason ctypes has not replaces
> hand-tuned swig is that it apparently is much slower. I know that someone,
> for instance, once did a pygame fork using ctypes to wrap SDL, and got it to
> run, but gave it up for comparative slowness reasons.

I never did the comparison with hand-tuned swig. It's faster than
ctypes for calls and manipulation, C extension beat it to some degree.
It's uber fast on PyPy (a bit over the native call, but we'll get it
to the native call level).