Wanting to avoid forcing users of burgled-batteries to deal with cpython reference counts for Python types with unknown translation, I'm exploring not one, but two separate strategies for automatically handling the issue.

The second, upon which I based my previous ill-advised CFFI trick 1, and for which I am grateful to Paul Khuong for correcting ( Read more... )

Lisp finalizers, at least the ones provided by trivial-garbage, are not at first glance particularly useful.

You can't reference the object being finalized-on some lisps, the object is already gone by the time you get to the finalizer-so you can't inspect the constituent parts of an object to operate on them. Closing over the parts only works in ( Read more... )

When interfacing with C, sometimes you want to know something which isn't provided in the shared object or DLL you're using (perhaps because it's tucked away in a C header file instead) and your options are: write a little C to get at that bit of info, or embed that information into your program and hope it doesn't change. While the latter is ( Read more... )

Unlike Lisp, C lacks the ability to return multiple values, and so some C functions take arguments which are used to return a value. When dealing with such a C function, we'd really rather convert such things into something more Lispy, like a secondary return value, and not pass an argument to the function at all.

In other words, given the C ( Read more... )

Working on burgled-batteries, I found that a non-trivial portion of Python's C API isn't actually exported functions, but preprocessor macros disguised as functions. In the interests of continuing to work if they go back and forth on any given function, I thought it would be a good idea to automatically detect if the function exists, and use an ( Read more... )