GUIs - A Modest Proposal

Martin v. Loewis martin at v.loewis.de
Sat Jun 12 03:21:31 EDT 2010


> Yeah. I get the policy in general, a proliferation of ctypes stuff could
> be very bad -- but if code is very careful with type-checking and stuff,
> it should be possible to get an exception, I'd hope.

Only if you can live with the respective module not being available all
the time.

The issue is not that you may mistakes in the ctypes code, thus allowing
users to crash Python. The issue is that if users remove ctypes (which
they may want to do because it's not trustworthy), then your module will
stop working (unless you have a fallback for the case that ctypes is
unavailable).

In general, it's undesirable that absence of some module causes a 
different module to stop working in the standard library, except that
absence of Tkinter clearly causes IDLE and turtle to stop working.

> Otherwise it makes certain windows-workarounds very problematic. You
> basically /have/ to write a C extension :|

That's not problematic at all, for the standard library. Just write that 
C extension.

Regards,
Martin



More information about the Python-list mailing list