[Python-ideas] PEP: Hide implementation details in the C API

[Nick Coghlan]

On 13 July 2017 at 21:46, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2017-07-12 20:51 GMT+02:00 Brett Cannon <brett at python.org>:
>> I think Victor has long-term plans to try and hide the struct details at a
>> higher-level and so that would make macros a bad thing. But ignoring the
>> specific Py_INCREF/DECREF example, switching to functions does buy us the
>> ability to actually change the function implementations between Python
>> versions compared to having to worry about what a macro used to do (which is
>> a possibility with the stable ABI).
>
> I think that my PEP is currently badly written :-)
>
> In fact, the idea is just to make the stable ABI usable :-) Instead of
> hiding structures *and* remove macros, my idea is just to hide
> structures but still provides macros... as functions. Basically, it
> will be the same API, but usable on more various implementations of
> Python.

As far as I know, this isn't really why folks find the stable ABI hard
to switch to. Rather, I believe it's because switching to the stable
ABI means completely changing how you define classes to be closer to
the way you define them from Python code.

That's why I like the idea of defining a "portable" API that *doesn't*
adhere to the "no public structs" rule - if we can restore support for
static class declarations (which requires exposing all the static
method structs as well as the object header structs, although perhaps
with obfuscated field names to avoid any dependency on the details of
CPython's reference counting model), I think such an API would have
dramatically lower barriers to adoption than the stable ABI does.

Cheers,
Nick.

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