This isn't a PEP yet: it's a set of requirements. A PEP eventually
needs to
say how to implement the requirements, and even at this "proto-PEP"
stage,
it needs to be plausible that it's implementable. It's on you to
explain
how your very ambitious requirements can be satisfied in Python.
Nobody's
going to ask you for an implementation, but references to related tech
like
HPy and ctypes combined with discussion of how they do or don't meet
your
requirements would be helpful.
2023-04-23 21:13 に Evan Greenup via Python-ideas さんは書きました:
However there is a lot of limitation in those library [like PyO3].
For good reason. Python does not share data structures with those other
languages. CPython's native data structures are a subset of those
implemented
in C -- obviously, because CPython is implemented in C. But other
languages
will implement "mutable extensible memory-safe sequence" (ie, Python's
list)
in different ways (and famously C doesn't provide that!) On the other
hand,
data structures in other languages may have no built-in equivalent in
Python.
The low-level cytpes stdlib module provides the flexibility you want,
but it's
implementation-dependent on the foreign side, and must be.
* The project structure is rigid.
This is a complaint about specific third-party libraries that provide
high-
level wrapping of a fundamentally low-level facility. I would *expect*
the
project structure to be rigid.
I think you might find it easier to present the proposal convincingly if
you
"build up" from ctypes, instead of "building down" from PyO3.
* It is really ridiculous when you want to stick some item on the
wall. You need to totally redesign this item and manufacture a new
item to fit the glue you are going to use.
This is not true of ctypes, which is designed as the thinnest possible
wrapper around other languages (specifically C, but to the extent that
most C
implementations provide facilities for calling FORTRAN and other such
languages, it should be possible to extend ctypes to those languages in
that
way).
As a glue language, Python should be designed to glue other native
programming
language as a feature of Python programming language itself
As far as I can see this is not feasible, and vastly overemphasizes
Python's role
as a glue language. Python is a programming language first, and the
business of
the Python programming language is to be Python. Interfacing to other
languages
is going to be more or less painful depending on how closely the
internals are
related, and in general it will be hardware-dependent.
* The interface is universal across all variant and version of Python
implementation
It took Microsoft 15 versions and a couple of decades to manage this
with just
its own runtime library. Remember, not only do Python internals change
from
version to version, but so do those of other languages. C++ is infamous
for
incompatibility, in fact. It's hard to imagine that the Python side of
the
interface can be completely independent of the other language, when the
whole
point is that the other language has specific features that *Python does
not*.
As Jelle mentions, a standardized ABI for Python is in process, the
current
iteration being the HPy project. However AIUI the goal is a consistent
ABI
across Python versions, not making construction of FFIs easier. All it
should
do I believe is remove ABI compatibility across Python versions from the
set of
problems an FFI needs to deal with. That's useful, but doesn't remove
any of
the complexity caused by different representations in the target
language.
It is a lively data structure with in-memory representation, they are
unified
no matter what Python variant is used and what low level native
language is
used.
So you're suggesting an intermediate data representation, likely
requiring two
translations (Python to intermediate and intermediate to target
language) each
time data is to be transferred from Python to a target language and
back. If
HPy succeeds then that ABI can be frozen as both the Python ABI and the
inter-
mediate representation, of course.
However, consider the C++ standard template library. In Python,
everything is
an object, with a consistent handle. Lists and tuples are uniform
sequences of
handles, dicts are uniform handle-to-handle mappings. That's not so in
the C++
template library. The whole point is to provide individual routines
optimized
to each variant of a data structure based on the template's type
variables. It's
one-many, not one-one, from the point of view of your proposed FFI ABI.
It seems
to me that more than Python's internal representation, which changes
fairly slowly
and is pretty well-documented, the target ABI is more variable, and if
the target
is as low-level as C there is not going to be one because equivalents of
Python
structures will be defined per-project rather than for all C libraries.
* This mechanism is transparent to users, there is modules in standard
library
to support it. [...] This mechanism provide user with maximum
flexibility.
That sounds like ctypes to me.
* almost zero-cost abstraction.
What does that mean?
It just make some basic data representation conversion and
invoke the method in dynamic library.
Still sounds like ctypes to me.
So I come back to the theme: what do you want that ctypes doesn't
provide?
https://docs.python.org/3/library/ctypes.html
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