Comment by ngoldbaum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ngoldbaum | Hacker News Reader

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My headline feature is the new “abi3t” stable ABI for the free-threaded build. While Petr Viktorin did most of the CPython implementation, I’ve been trying to make sure ecosystem support is ready. It’s been a rewarding but quite challenging project to make sure everything is working. There were some late nights leading up to the beta1 release when we found a Windows-specific issue that needed a fix.

I’m particularly proud that the cryptography project is already shipping a single abi3.abi3t wheel for each platform on Python 3.15 or newer. The GIL-enabled build and free-threaded build can both use the same wheel now, because PyObject is opaque.

If you want to learn more about this, I gave a talk at EuroPython this year on Python’s ABI and the road to building and releasing abi3t today. See https://youtu.be/An8lO29SxXE.

As a maintainer of a Python module that uses abi3 now, thank you!

Just one question: any plans to promote APIs like PyUnstable_EnableTryIncRef() and PyUnstable_TryIncRef() into the limited API? So far we have found that these APIs are necessary to implement the weak-valued caches we've always used in the past: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/6559a9f9622...

I’m glad to see there’s ongoing work to get protobuf working!

I doubt PyUnstable APIs will get promoted directly to the limited API without at least a release or two in the regular version-specific API first.

That said, if you would be willing to start a thread on discourse describing your need and use-case, that is probably the first step to stabilizing the APIs you want. It may also turn out there’s an alternate way to get protobuf working.

Please do feel free to reach out privately. I’d love to be able to chat with people working on protobuf and grpcio, they come up reasonably often and it’s hard to get official updates from inside Google.

Are you aware of specific issues remaining in pyo3’s abi3t support or is that good to go?

It should be good to go, but of course I don’t know what your codebase looks like and issues are always possible in any code, “good to go” or no. Please do give it a try and try testing on 3.15 and 3.15t.

Came here to say this. A stable ABI will mean that libraries can make a single free-threaded build that'll last at least a couple of Python versions into the future.

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