Book Image

Learning Cython Programming

By : Philip Herron
Book Image

Learning Cython Programming

By: Philip Herron

Overview of this book

<p>Cython is a very powerful combination of Python and C. Using Cython, you can write Python code that calls back and forth from and to C or C++ code natively at any point. It is a language with extra syntax allowing for optional static type declarations. It is also a very popular language as it can be used for multicore programming.</p> <p>Learning Cython Programming will provide you with a detailed guide to extending your native applications in pure Python; imagine embedding a twisted web server into your native application with pure Python code. You will also learn how to get your new applications up and running by reusing Python’s extensive libraries such as Logging and Config Parser to name a few.</p> <p>With Learning Cython Programming, you will learn that writing your own Python module in C from scratch is not only hard, but is also unsafe. Cython will automatically handle all type-conversion issues as well as garbage collection on your code. You can also still write all your code in Python but have it compiled and called directly in C as if it was just another function or data.</p> <p>This book also demonstrates how you can take the open source project Tmux and extend it to add new commands directly in pure Python. With this book, you will learn everything you need to know to get up and running with Cython and how you can reuse examples in a practical way.</p>
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Cythonizing struct cmd_entry


Next, let's consider creating a cythonfile.pxd file for the necessary cdef declarations of Tmux that we need to be aware of. We need to look at the struct cmd_entry declaration and work backwards from this:

struct cmd_entry {
  const char  *name;
  const char  *alias;

  const char  *args_template;
  int     args_lower;
  int     args_upper;

  const char  *usage;
  int     flags;

  void     (*key_binding)(struct cmd *, int);
  int     (*check)(struct args *);
  enum cmd_retval   (*execc)(struct cmd *, struct cmd_q *);
};

As you can see, cmd_entry depends on several other types, so we need to work backwards a little bit. If you're going to be lazy and live dangerously, you can get away with it sometimes if you don't care about accessing the data correctly by casting any pointers such as void *. But if you're a seasoned C programmer, you know this is fairly dangerous and should be avoided. You can see this type depends on struct cmd *, struct cmd_q * and struct...