Home Original page

Reliability of venster+ctypes on win32

Dave Brueck dave at pythonapocrypha.com
Thu Apr 1 09:03:45 EST 2004 
Somesh wrote:
> I downloaded and tried a small dialog-dll's application with
> venster+ctypes+python 2.3
> its working very well, but is it reliable to use in big projects ? or
> part of big projects ?

You'll have to make that determination yourself, but IMO they are both very
stable. We started using them both in production applications sooner than the
authors probably would have advised, but didn't encounter problems (we've
certainly never had any crashes due to either library, for example).

> wot are advantages/disadvantages of this combination over win32all
> package of Mark Hammond ? plz guide me before i starting using it ../

win32all is a bigger install, so we chose not to use it with a couple of
applications in which download size was critical. Another drawback is that the
only APIs available are ones that the win32all author has chosen to include,
whereas ctypes lets you call pretty much anything, including 3rd party DLLs. A
drawback of ctypes is that it is more low-level in some cases, so sometimes you
have to do more things "by hand". For example, win32com has some very slick COM
support, especially if you're a COM client using IDispatch interfaces. You can
do all the same stuff in ctypes, but its COM offering isn't as mature yet.

Although Venster is young, you can still use it to do whatever Win32 GUIs you
need. It's probably the only pure Python GUI framework out there (which in
itself it pretty nifty), and if you're targeting the Windows platform and
already have experience doing Win32 GUI programming then you should definitely
consider it. It's not nearly as high-level as, say, wxPython (so proceed with
caution if you don't have Win32 GUI API experience), but advantages include
blazingly fast application load times compared to other frameworks and very,
very tiny footprint (we added a GUI to our application and increased the
download size by <30KB! :) )

We don't use win32all anymore, but there's certainly no reason why you have to
choose one or the other - if it makes sense then you can use both.

-Dave
More information about the Python-list mailing list