Python Questions - July 25, 2015

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Tue, 28 Jul 2015 17:45:00 +0100, BartC writes:
>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.

People who use numpy also want to load up their c extensions a
whole lot.  If you have a hunk of C code (a library, ususually) and
you want to call it from your python code, and play with its
objects just like they were python objects, this is one of the
most common ways to do this.

Laura