On 6/18/2012 5:29 PM, Armin Rigo wrote:
On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 9:10 PM, Maciej Fijalkowski <fij...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Me
Make cffi less buggy (check the tracker for new test cases ;-), faster
(closer to swig type wrappers), and easier to use than ctypes, and I am sure
there will be interest.
I would say it's already fulfilling those three, but I suppose you should
try for yourself.
I don't think the first is fulfilled so far, as we found various
issues on various Linux and non-Linux platforms (and fixed them, so I
suppose that release 0.1.1 is coming soon). But I agree with Fijal
about speed and ease of use. Like SWIG it generates wrappers in the
form of a CPython C extension with built-in functions, so I suppose
the performance is similar to SWIG and not ctypes. Well, SWIG
wrappers typically have custom logic written in C, whereas in cffi
this logic is typically written as Python code, so I suppose it ends
up being slower (on CPython; on PyPy small wrapping functions are
inlined and have little cost). But the same argument can be pushed
further to "why did you use a slow language like Python to write your
app in the first place", which I hope we agree is bogus :-)
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.)
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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