[Python-Dev] PEP 384 status

[David Cournapeau]

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 7:59 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 6:34 PM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
>> In other words, the problem mainly arises when you need to integrate
>> libraries which you can not recompile with the compiler used by
>> python, because the code is not visual-studio compatible, or because
>> the library is only available in binary form.
>
> In my case, I was building on an old dev system which only has VC6,
> but needed to link against Python 2.4 (which was compiled with MSVC
> 2005). The build process didn't use distutils, so that didn't affect
> anything.

ok, I was confused by "I just recompiled".

>
> It works, you just have to know what APIs you have to avoid.

The critical point is that you cannot always do that. Retaking my
example of mkstemp: I have a C library which has a fdopen-like
function (built with one C runtime, not the same as python), there is
no way that I know of to use this API with a file descriptor obtained
from tempfile.mkstemp function. The only solution is to build my own C
extension with C mkstemp, built with the same runtime as my library,
and make that available to python.

cheers,

David