Cython

The topic for this month's PyGTA meeting was Cython. However, instead of a presentation we had a coding dojo session in which we tried to solve a problem using Cython. We certainly had fun, which is one goal of a coding dojo session, but we lost the plot at some point and didn't achieve most of the other goals.

Python has a peculiarity that doesn't occur in most other languages: there are often several competing libraries or frameworks that accomplish the same thing. Look at all the Python web frameworks, for example. Cython is another example of this phenomenon. Cython is similar to SWIG, ctypes, Boost.Python, and maybe even a few others. Each of these allows you write (or generate) wrappers for low level C/C++ functions in Python.

Python's mantra, "There is only one way to do it," applies only to the language itself and not to stuff written in Python. Now you know. ^_^