Hi all, Here are the beginnings off CFFI-based Python bindings, rather than the ctypes-based ones currently available. I started this work in order to get faster bindings on pypy since a script of mine was running slower on pypy than CPython. Initially aiming for a drop-in replacement of the existing bindings I ended up abandoning this to help enforce correct usage of the API. The benefits of this approach are: - More "Pythonic" API, e.g. tags behave like sets, iterators which get consumed can easily be re-created as is usual with collections, avoid allowing invalid combinations of args and calls on a Python-API level. - CFFI, this works on both CPython and PyPy, on the latter it is (supposed to be) a lot faster as the JIT can cross the boundary between C and Python code where it otherwise has extra overheads to emulate the C-Python API. Additionally it makes it safer to use compared to ctypes, it works on the API level using the compiler to figure out the correct details of the platform. Compared to ctypes which only works on the ABI level and you need to rely on knowing the layout of code when writing the Python bindings. Additionaly I belive these bindings fix a memory safety issue, certain situations in my test-suite would lead to coredump which is not something which should be possible from within Python. I believe I have seen similar reports in the list archives so am not the only one seeing these. Sadly these are hard to isolate and I have not managed to re-create this in a nice minimal example, however I believe the root cause is that in some situations, mostly interpreter shutdown, the __del__ method can have been called while there are still references to the object and while child-objects are still alive. This effectively results in double-frees as the child object frees memory already freed by the parent. These bindings solve this by adding the .alive property and using this to check parent objects are still alive before destroying themselves. This is somewhat expensive, but works and is easy to implement. Lastly there are some downsides to the choices I made: - I ended up going squarely for CPython 3.6+. Choosing Python 3 allowed better API design, e.g. with keyword-only parameters etc. Choosing CPython 3.4+ restricts the madness that can happen with __del__ and gives some newer (tho now unused) features in weakref.finalizer. - This is no longer drop-in compatible. - I haven't got to a stage where my initial goal of speed has been proven yet. In theory I think it's possible to create a CFFI-based drop-in replacement to the bindings, only adding the memory-safety fixes and keeping the Python 2.7 compatibility. It would then be possible to build the API proposed in these bindings on top of this, but once I was making these bindings safer it felt strange to still allow the API to be misused. There are a lot of details about this which can be discussed, also many finer implementation points and even just getting the proposed API right (you'll notice large gaps for now). But this mail is already too long. I look forward to your comments and feedback on the approach taken and on whether some form of this could make it into the main repo. Lastly a small note on the AUTHORS file patch, due to my own unfortunate choice of employer I have strict rules to follow on how to submit patches. One of which is to add this line if an AUTHORS file exists. Given clearly not everyone is listed here though maybe this is not appropriate. I would also rather receive email on flub@devork.be rather than the address I have to use in the git commits. Kind Regards, Floris _______________________________________________ notmuch mailing list notmuch@notmuchmail.org https://notmuchmail.org/mailman/listinfo/notmuch