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[Python-Dev] libffi embedded in CPython

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Wed Mar 11 18:56:14 CET 2015 
On 11 March 2015 at 17:27, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> I'm going to propose a somewhat controversial idea: let's deprecate the
> ctypes module. We now have things like cffi and Cython for people who need
> to interface with C code. Both of those projects are maintained. And they
> are not overly difficult to work with. All of this seems to match the
> reasons we added ctypes in the first place while also being safer to use
> than ctypes.

-1. On Windows a huge amount of code uses ctypes to interface with the
Windows API. Many of those projects transitioned from pywin32 because
that is a big dependency, and a binary build. Not having in-core
access to the Windows API would be a huge problem for many projects.
Who would rewrite projects like pyreadline or colorama, for example?
How would pip (which has to vendor everything and can't include binary
dependencies because of its nature) locate the correct windows config
file folders without ctypes in core?

Paul
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