Frustration

A Python user is starting a project and thinks to themselves, “Yay, new code! I can use Python 3 for this!”. They install the latest Anaconda for Py3 and get to work. A few days and hundreds of lines of code later they find out that a particular library they need (maybe imposm.parser) only supports Python 2. Our well intentioned user sighs, re-installs Anaconda for Py2, and carries on. Maybe next time (or maybe not). (This is a semi-autobiographical story.)

Elsewhere, a Python library maintainer is excited about Py3’s new asyncio module and could put it to immediate use but doesn’t want to alienate users who are stuck on Py2.

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There are many valid reasons to be using Py2 today: a dated dependency, the inertia of existing code, not wanting to break a working setup, not knowing how/why to switch, and lack of time.

There are also many valid reasons for wanting to develop exclusively for Py3: access to new features, reduced support burden, simplified maintenance, wanting to get ahead of the 2020 end-of-support for Py2, and lack of time. These tensions have the potential to create much frustration in the Python community, but I think with some intentional effort on the part of Python developers and leaders it will all be fine.  Continue reading “Python 3 Universally” →

One of my upcoming tasks at work is converting Pandana to support both Python 2 and 3. The tricky bit is that Pandana has a C extension written in plain C using the Python 2 C-API, which is not compatible with Python 3.

It seems like the best way to have a C extension that supports both Python 2 and 3 is to not write the extension in C. These days there are a number of alternatives that allow you to write interfaces in Python or something like Python (Cython). I decided to make a sample project with some C functions to wrap so that I could try out CFFI, Cython, and the standard library ctypes module.

You can find the project with examples of all three and a longer writeup at https://github.com/jiffyclub/cext23. Pull requests are welcome on the repo with further examples!