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Comment by aportnoy | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone point to an introduction to CPython internals? My goal is to write a Python extension in C that manipulates Python objects.

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The official docs aren't bad. https://docs.python.org/3/extending/index.html

Try boost-python, SWIG or cython instead. They give you a nicer c++ api and automatically handles ref-counting, exception handling and other things that are easy to forget.

https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_61_0/libs/python/doc/html/t...

How is the Boost/PyPy integration? Sure, there's cpyext, so in principle a Boost-generated extension can be used by pypy.

Are there any changes which would make Boost-based extensions better integrated/supported by PyPy?

The linked-to document only talks about Cython and cffi.

There is cppyy, which is cffi for c++. Boost python is not being maintained, in the cpython world pybind11 is more popular but cppyy is pypy freindly

Boost isn't being maintained? I did not know that. One of the project I use often - F/OSS but I'm a user, not core developer - uses Boost for C++/Python integration. They chose it many years ago. This topic has never come up on the mailing list or user group meetings. I suspect that since Boost "just works", no one has care to re-evaluate that decision.

Thanks for the pointers to what's going on in the C++/python integration layer. I'll experiment with it.

There is a full course on the subject at http://www.pgbovine.net/cpython-internals.htm.

This looks really interesting. Saving for later as I've been wanting to dive into python much more.

Depending on what you're trying to do, Cython might be a slightly easier option as well.

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