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[Python-Dev] cffi in stdlib

Armin Rigo arigo at tunes.org
Sat Mar 2 09:48:42 CET 2013 
Hi Gregory,

On Sat, Mar 2, 2013 at 8:40 AM, Gregory P. Smith <greg at krypto.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 7:57 AM, Eli Bendersky <eliben at gmail.com> wrote:
>> So would you say that the main use of the API level is provide an
>> alternative for writing C API code to interface to C libraries. IOW, it's in
>> competition with Swig?
>
> I'd hardly call it competition. The primary language I interface with is C++
> and cffi appears not see that giant elephant in the room

I don't think it's in competition with Swig, which does C++.  There
are certain workloads in which C++ is the elephant in the room; we
don't address such workloads.  If you want some more motivation, the
initial goal was to access the large number of standard Linux/Posix
libraries that are C (or have a C interface), but are too hard to
access for ctypes (macros, partially-documented structure types,
#define for constants, etc.).  For this goal, it works great.

> (it'd need to use clang for parsing if it were going to do that)...

I fear parsing is merely the tip of the iceberg when we talk about
interfacing with C++.


A bientôt,

Armin.
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