Brussels / 31 January & 1 February 2015

schedule

Extending Python, what is the best option for me


Python is a great language, but there are occasions where we need access to low level operations or connect with some database driver written in C or we need to overcome to some speed boottleneck in Python due to some limitation in the language, like NumPy or Scikit-learn do, using extensions.

With the FFI(Foreign function interface) we can connect Python with other languages like C, C++ and even Rust or Fortran. There are some alternatives to achieve this goal, Native Extensions, Ctypes and CFFI. We'll compare this three ways of extending Python and we'll study pros and cons of each approach.

Python is a great language, but there are occasions where we need access to low level operations or connect with some database driver written in C or we need to overcome to some speed boottleneck in Python due to some limitation in the language, like NumPy or Scikit-learn do, using extensions.

With the FFI(Foreign function interface) we can connect Python with other languages like C, C++ and even Rust or Fortran. There are some alternatives to achieve this goal, Native Extensions, Ctypes and CFFI. We'll compare this three ways of extending Python and we'll study pros and cons of each approach.

Speakers

Francisco Fernández Castaño

Links