[Cython] Utility Codes and templates

[Dag Sverre Seljebotn]

On 07/22/2011 01:10 PM, Stefan Behnel wrote:
> mark florisson, 22.07.2011 12:12:
>> For my work on the _memview branch (and also on fused types) I noticed
>> that UtilityCodes started weighing heavily on me in their current
>> form, so I wrote a little loader in the _memview branch:
>>
>> https://github.com/markflorisson88/cython/commit/e13debed2db78680ec0bd8c343433a2b73bd5e64#L2R110
>>
>>
>> The idea is simple: you put your utility codes in Cython/Utility in
>> .pyx, .c, .h files etc, and then load them. It works for both
>> prototypes and implementations, for UtilityCode and CythonUtilityCode:
>>
>> myutility.c
>>
>> // UtilityProto: MyUtility
>> header code here
>>
>> // UtilityCode: MyUtility
>> implementation code here
>>
>> You can add as many other utilities as you like to the same file. You
>> can then load it using
>>
>> UtilityCode.load_utility_from_file("myutility.c", "MyUtility")
>
> Why not have exactly one per file? They can't (or at least shouldn't) be
> interdependent anyway, since they're always loaded and injected
> separately. Having one per file makes it easy to take the file name and
> grep for it.
>
>
>> Of course you can pass in any other arguments, like proto_block, name,
>> etc. You can additionally pass it a dict for formatting (for both the
>> prototypes and the implementation)
>
> Dict? Why not keyword arguments?
>
> I'd prefer an interface like this:
>
> UtilityCode.load_from_file("myutility",
> some_format_arg="somename", some_repeat_arg = 2)
>
> That would automatically look up the corresponding files
> Cython/UtilityCode/myutility.{pyx,c,cpp,h}
> and take whichever it finds (first), then run the template engine on it.
>
> I don't think we need to support separate arguments for prototype and
> code section, they can just use different names. Keep it simple.
>
>
>> It will return a UtilityCode instance ready for use.
>> You can also simply retrieve a utility code as a string, where it
>> returns (proto, implementation).
>>
>> As debated before, an actual template library would be really
>> convenient. Dag and I had a discussion about it and he suggested
>> Tempita (by Ian Bicking), it is compatible with Python 2 and Python 3,
>> and is pure-python. It supports all the good things like iteration,
>> template inheritance, etc. Now I'm not sure whether it supports python
>> 2.3 as it doesn't compile on my system, but it does support 2.4
>> (confirmation for 2.3 would be appreciated). On a side note, I'd be
>> perfectly happy to drop support for 2.3, it's kind of a chore.
>> The documentation for Tempita can be found here:
>> http://pythonpaste.org/tempita/
>>
>> That way we might rid ourselves of a lot of code.putln() and move
>> those to template utilities instead (or at least prevent writing more
>> of those). What do you guys think?
>
> I'm fine with using a template engine for the more involved cases (which
> are rare enough). However, I'd prefer not adding a new dependency, but
> just shipping a tiny single-module engine with Cython, e.g. Templite or
> pyratemp (just found them, never used them).

BTW, I don't think anybody is suggesting having an *external* dependency 
that users would need to go fetch themselves....that would be insane.

Dag Sverre