There is a flash of light! Your PYTHON has evolved into PSYDUCK!

[glyf]

I guess if you don't read any other python-related blogs (or news, or mailing lists, for that matter) you might not already know that the first alpha of Python 3.0 has been released.

A sample of the release notes:

• There are a few memory leaks
• SSL support is disabled
• Platform support is reduced
• There may be additional issues on 64-bit architectures

Comments

Re: What is a platform?

[glyf]

The words "library", "engine", "toolkit", and "framework" all imply to me that while the code may be usable, it still might not be stable enough to depend on in your installed environment. You can see this in the way that commercial software treats its environment: they will distribute everything, right down to the C runtime that the application uses, along with their application.

The word "platform" means some code that you don't or can't distribute with your application.

Some things become platforms without stability due to the inability to share resources. For example, X11 is a platform regardless of some of the instability and experimental stuff present in the Render and Composite extensions, since you only have one graphics card. In other cases the "resource" is a license: if you're writing a Photoshop plugin, Photoshop is your platform.

The stability that comes along with a more or less permanent commitment to a really stable API can also make you a "platform". UNIX's libc, for example, pretty much just works; you never have to distribute your own "strlen" or "creat" implementation along with your application. Even "gets", a horror which has been deprecated for decades now, will still work (screaming at you the whole time) if you have some really old code which uses it.

Platforms do have one key advantage; they can specify ways that code distributed by different "vendors" can communicate with each other. For example, the UNIX platform has the ability to locate other code by looking around the filesystem and using dlopen(). Photoshop plugins can publish metadata about themselves that photoshop (and other plugins) can read. Python right now has a lot of useful tools in this area, and systems like twisted.plugin and setuptools show promise of some interesting capabilities that Python-as-a-platform might develop: but if those APIs change, then you've got a new platform each time, and authors who want their applications to "just work" for end users will distribute the entire environment with their application, making it a closed system.