Python Questions - July 25, 2015

[Rob Gaddi]

On Tue, 28 Jul 2015 17:45:00 +0100, BartC wrote:

> On 28/07/2015 17:12, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> On Tue, 28 Jul 2015 07:46 pm, BartC wrote:
>>
>>> (I'm still reeling from the size of that Anaconda download. Apparently
>>> it contains a whole bunch of stuff, nothing to do with numpy, that I
>>> don't need. But one of the listed packages was 'libffi', which is
>>> puzzling. This library lets a C-like language call functions with
>>> runtime-determined argument types. How would that be used in Python?)
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libffi
> 
> Yes, I know (I was looking at it myself a few days ago for another
> project). But while it might be used for implementing some of Python's
> internals, I was wondering what it was doing in a user-level set of
> libraries, given that it's mostly a bunch of C code.
> 
> Perhaps they were just padding the list to make it look more impressive.

It underpins the ctypes implementation, which is neither here nor there.

If I remember right, numpy does dynamic loading of one of a couple 
different (FORTRAN?) algebra libraries depending on which ones it can 
find installed.  That would be a pretty clear use case for libffi.

-- 
Rob Gaddi, Highland Technology -- www.highlandtechnology.com
Email address domain is currently out of order.  See above to fix.