Python/D API

[David Rushby]

In article <e55d00$nl2$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Kirk McDonald says...
> That's a really nice package.  I've been spending the past day or so
> looking through it. ("Celerid"? Where does that name come from?)

>From "celerity", which means "swiftness of action or motion".  It's intended to
refer to the fusion of the development speed of Python with the execution speed
of D.

> It is a pity about DMD not doing dynamic linking outside of
> Windows, though your header is still useful for embedding Python
> in a D program on a Linux system:

Indeed, that's worth noting.  However, extending Python with a compiled language
is a vastly more popular option than embedding it in the compiled language.

I can only speak for myself, but the reason I strongly prefer extending Python
to embedding it is that extension is more compatible with my Lispish development
style, which tends toward bottom-up design and loose coupling.  My Python
programs are usually structured as loose collections of modules that can be
imported and called by yet-to-be-written code, and some of these modules are
also launchable as standalone programs to perform specific subtasks.

At the outset, I usually launch a given body of code both "the way it would
normally be run" and via a test suite collector.  So right there are two "launch
points" that I wouldn't want compiled into a single executable.  Also, I often
end up importing and calling code that I wrote months earlier from a context
that I couldn't have foreseen when I wrote the code.  Embedding rather than
extending would complicate that approach greatly.

The performance-critical code that I would write in D instead of Python tends to
appear at the lower levels of program organization.  In my programs, a given
unit of such code typically concerns itself with *one thing only*, and it is
then combined with other code by a high-level Python module.  The coupling
between program units takes place at the Python level, where unforeseen reuse
and radical reorganization are much easier.

So embedding Python in D is an interesting option, but it definitely wouldn't
suit my development style.