On Tue, 28 Jul 2015 17:45:00 +0100, BartC wrote: > On 28/07/2015 17:12, Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> On Tue, 28 Jul 2015 07:46 pm, BartC wrote: >> >>> (I'm still reeling from the size of that Anaconda download. Apparently >>> it contains a whole bunch of stuff, nothing to do with numpy, that I >>> don't need. But one of the listed packages was 'libffi', which is >>> puzzling. This library lets a C-like language call functions with >>> runtime-determined argument types. How would that be used in Python?) >> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libffi > > Yes, I know (I was looking at it myself a few days ago for another > project). But while it might be used for implementing some of Python's > internals, I was wondering what it was doing in a user-level set of > libraries, given that it's mostly a bunch of C code. > > Perhaps they were just padding the list to make it look more impressive.
It underpins the ctypes implementation, which is neither here nor there. If I remember right, numpy does dynamic loading of one of a couple different (FORTRAN?) algebra libraries depending on which ones it can find installed. That would be a pretty clear use case for libffi. -- Rob Gaddi, Highland Technology -- www.highlandtechnology.com Email address domain is currently out of order. See above to fix. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
