It's been observed a couple times recently ... distributing and compiling extensions is a pain, especially on windows, when the main supported compilers are not freely availble .. nor even commercially availble anymore.
What we need is a way to break out of this dependency. A way for python extensions to be built using any C compiler and be able to target multiple Python runtime version with a single binary build. I believe I have such a solution.It is heavily influenced byt Java's Native Interface, which achieved this independence since day one. The technical details are too combersome to post here, so I added a page to my projects's homepage detailing my proposal. If there is interest, I'd be interested in working on the PEP and the implementation.The URL for the proposal is http://jpype.sourceforge.net/pni.html This solution may not be complete. Of multi-platform details might make some suggestion impossible or impractical. Please take this proposal as a starting point for a discussion. I have a working prototype for steps 1 that I am using to implement JPype. So this is not a pipe dream. it is real and functional. Please leave tour comments here, or better yet on my blog at http://jpype.blogspot.com . Steve Menard Author and Maintainer of JPype ( http://jpype.sourceforge.net ) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
