midi with ctypes

[Thomas Heller]

anton at vredegoor.doge.nl (Anton Vredegoor) writes:

> danbmil99 at yahoo.com (dan) topposted:
>
>>Interesting idea, but frankly it seems like alot of extra overhead. 
>>Now that midipy is compiling, I'm more inclined to add features in C
>>than using ctypes.
>
> The microsoft visual C compiler is about half a gigabyte size, the
> soundfont SDK from creative labs is about 20 megabyte size, the OSC
> toolkit is about 3 megabyte size, the midipy.cpp is a few kilobyte
> size.
>
> Compare this with the ctypes solution: ctypes itself is about half a
> megabyte size and the ctypesmidipy.py is taking a few kilobytes.
>
> From this comparison one could conclude that the overhead is largely
> on the side of the current solution using C.
>
>>What advantages can we expect from doing it this way?
>
> The ctypes solution is cheaper, there are less license issues because
> there are less parties involved, it's a lot less code so it's easier
> to understand and maintain, programming this module in Python gives
> extra flexibility, and most importantly this could be a platform
> independent solution for MIDI programming. That would earn Python
> extra kudos from music programmers.

There may even be another advantage (in the future): the ctypes solution
may be more portable. Bradley Schatz has started porting ctypes to Java,
and so it seems also usable from Jython.  Not to speak of pypy...

Thomas