[Python-Dev] CFFI released

[Nick Coghlan]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 12:35 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> Yes, because languages have no speed, only implementations do; and yes,
> because when CPython really is too slow for a particular task, it can be
> pushed onto C. But some people (pygame, others on python-list) have reported
> that for their project, ctypes negates too much of the C speedup, relative
> to swig or similar. So it has not been quite the C wrapper generator killer
> that some people hoped for. (This is not to say that is not great for uses
> it does succeed at.)

There's also another reason ctypes hasn't taken over from Cython and
SWIG: because it's entirely ABI based and doesn't look at the C header
files, it loses even what little type safety C possesses.

SWIG and Cython, on the other hand, suffer from the fact that you
can't just decide to wrap an arbitrary DLL on the fly *without*
predefining an extension module, and you also can't just use C syntax
to define the ABI you want to access (although SWIG actually gets
pretty close in many cases).

The approach Armin and Maciej have chosen here (using C declarations
to define the ABI, and supporting verification against the C headers
as a separate step) looks very promising.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia