[Python-Dev] Status of the Argument Clinic DSL

[Alexander Belopolsky]

What is the current status of the Argument Clinic DSL?  The clinic
preprocessor was released [1] with Python 3.4 with a promise [2] "that
signature metadata for programmatic introspection will be added to
additional callables implemented in C as part of Python 3.4
maintenance releases."  We are now close to 3.6 beta and clinic
coverage in stdlib is sparse at best.  For example, the math module
makes no use of the clinic (but interestingly a few methods in cmath
do).  The documentation is very sparse as well.  While one would
expect PEP 436 to serve as *the* documentation while clinic is being
developed, but the PEP has the "Draft" status and has not been updated
since 2013.  Furthermore, the 3.4 release notes contain a warning
saying "The Argument Clinic PEP is not fully up to date with the state
of the implementation."  It does not look like this situation has
improved since.

The practical question is: does it make sense to invest time in
learning the clinic DSL and converting more modules (e.g. datetime) to
it or it is likely that the whole approach will be revised in the
future?

[1] http://bugs.python.org/issue16612
[2] https://docs.python.org/3.6/whatsnew/3.4.html?highlight=clinic#pep-436-argument-clinic