On 6/12/2010 3:21 AM, Martin v. Loewis wrote:
Yeah. I get the policy in general, a proliferation of ctypes stuff could
be very bad -- but if code is very careful with type-checking and stuff,
it should be possible to get an exception, I'd hope.
Only if you can live with the respective module not being available all
the time.
The issue is not that you may mistakes in the ctypes code, thus allowing
users to crash Python. The issue is that if users remove ctypes (which
they may want to do because it's not trustworthy), then your module will
stop working (unless you have a fallback for the case that ctypes is
unavailable).
In general, it's undesirable that absence of some module causes a
different module to stop working in the standard library, except that
absence of Tkinter clearly causes IDLE and turtle to stop working.
Having the absence of ctypes causing IDLE and turtle to stop working
would not be any worse, in a sense, though probably less expected.
Otherwise it makes certain windows-workarounds very problematic. You
basically /have/ to write a C extension :|
That's not problematic at all, for the standard library. Just write that
C extension.
I suppose one could develop in ctypes and then rewrite when 'stable',
though 'stable' seldom is.
Would it be possible to write a program that converts a module that uses
ctypes to interface to a dll to a corresponding C extension program that
would compile to a drop in replacement extension module?
Given that the latter tends to be faster (as discovered/claimed by the
pygame folks), this might prove useful for more than the specific case.
Terry Jan Reedy
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