David Cournapeau wrote: > Martijn Faassen wrote: > > > > Yes, this one would be a major challenge. If you can crack it and the > > PyPy interpreter offers another benefit (an obvious one is speed), you > > will be in awesome position. If not, the other benefits will have to > > weigh more strongly. This is definitely one to evolve slowly over time > > if it's possible at all. > I don't understand the C++ part. How many useful python modules use C++ > ? For a start, my understanding is that python itself (interprter + > stdlib) do not use C++ at all.
Well, each time you have an interesting C++ library, you have an interesting python module written in C++. Two kinds of modules come to my mind: - wxPython is a good wrapper around the big C++ wxWidgets library. A cross-platform GUI, 500 classes, 6000 methods are exposed. Of course the underlying GTK and Win32 functions are C calls, but do you want to port wxWidgets to rpython? - I like to test and automate my own C++ applications with python... > Wrapping C++ in any language other than > itself is a pain anyway :) Indeed. But there are tools to generate most of the painful code: Swig, boost::python, and others. With Swig, you can even subclass C++ classes and override virtual methods in python. I wish pypy could do the same. If I understand correctly, pypy now uses its own "rffi" mechanism (for "RPython foreign function call"?) to access external C functions. rffi itself does not use ctypes: when translating a function call, it is enough to write the C function call, and link with the correct library. ctypes is used only when executing external functions on top of CPython: in tests, or in the pypy.py interpreter. We could do it differently, for example by quickly compiling an extension module for each function we need. It could be useful in some cases when ctypes cannot be used. For example when the C "function" is actually a macro, or a C++ function. Should we extend rffi to handle C++? -- Amaury Forgeot d'Arc _______________________________________________ pypy-dev@codespeak.net http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/pypy-dev
