(from stdlib-sig) ctypes or struct from an h file

[Yuvgoog Greenle]

Ok I see your point that C is ambiguous concerning compiler
implementation. I think #pragma pack should work out the padding issue
but I'm not sure if the floating point issue is solvable.

I don't have an idea for solving that one...

On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 11:14 PM, Erik Max Francis <max at alcyone.com> wrote:
> Yuvgoog Greenle wrote:
>>
>> I'd like to clarify the use case.
>>
>> Lets say you're writing a client and a server, one is in python and
>> the other is C. If these 2 programs need to pass binary information
>> between them (lets say over a socket) there are 2 options, it could be
>> nice if you could only write the struct once (either in python or in
>> C) without any Cython or C extension (for portability and ease of
>> development's sake).
>
> It's not as simple as that.  You have to know the binary format layouts
> (say, for floating point numbers) and struct padding that's used (since it
> can be inserted arbitrarily) on the C side of things, not to mention you
> have to arrange the whole the to be put into consistent (network) byte
> order.  Both sides have to take care of this, since if the server and client
> are running on different architectures, there's no guarantees any of these
> things will be the same.
>
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