dev call 20231109

Dev Call: 9 November 2023

Stepan, Florian, Antonio, Du Toit, Petr, Tim, Matti, Carl Friedrich

Since there wasn't overwhelming support, NI is more a research project.
Petr is focusing on the C API Evolution guidelines.
Current idea is to implement NI and emulate the legacy API (except of a few APIs that will anyway go away and should have appropriate replacements)
Which API is NI targeting
API should be split into two levels:
- Low-level: NI as presented; ABI only (no language-specific API)
- Higher-level (C): some API will map to NI-ABI (this could be HPy, Python C API, PyO3, ...)
Petr wants to limit the scope of NI to really to the necessary revolution.
Things under the hood (like vtable) can go in later.
CPython will never switch to handles; it will always use pointers but PyObject will become opaque. However, it is still a pointer and exposing location and identity.
Way forward:
- Add API to CPython
Antonio is concerned about the ABI explosion:
- ABI3
- ABI4
- NI
- NI + vtable
- HPy universal ?
Petr thinks the ABIs are subsets of each other. You build for ABI4 and will be compatible to ABI3.
How to publish on PyPI? Probably need some support from PIP to do renaming or whatever.
Another idea Petr had: using argument clinic to generate C-specific APIs on top of NI.
Antonio had the idea to do a C API summit at some popular conference (PyCon US or EuroPython)
- Let's ask some people that we think would be interested in such a summit; maybe also ask on some mailing list with good reachability