[Python-Dev] libffi embedded in CPython

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Wed, 11 Mar 2015 17:27:58 +0000
Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> 
> Did anyone ever step forward to do this? I'm a bit worried about the
> long-term viability of ctypes if we don't have a maintainer or at least
> someone making sure we are staying up-to-date with upstream libffi. The
> ctypes module is a dangerous thing, so having a chunk of C code that isn't
> being properly maintained seems to me to make it even more dangerous.

Depends what you call "dangerous". C code doesn't rot quicker than pure
Python code :-) Also, libffi really offers a wrapper around platform
ABIs, which rarely change.

> I'm going to propose a somewhat controversial idea: let's deprecate the
> ctypes module.

This is gratuitous.

> We now have things like cffi and Cython for people who need
> to interface with C code. Both of those projects are maintained. And they
> are not overly difficult to work with.

But they are not ctypes. For example, cffi wouldn't be obvious to use
for interfacing with non-C code, since it requires you to write C-like
declarations.

> All of this seems to match the
> reasons we added ctypes in the first place while also being safer to use
> than ctypes.

I don't understand why cffi would be safer than ctypes. At least not in
the operation mode where it doesn't need to invoke a C compiler.
Cython is a completely different beast, it requires a separate
compilation pass which makes it useless in some situations.

Regards

Antoine.