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You're reading from  Learning Cython Programming (Second Edition) - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inFeb 2016
Reading LevelBeginner
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781783551675
Edition2nd Edition
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Philip Herron
Philip Herron
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Philip Herron

Philip Herron is a developer who focuses his passion toward compilers and virtual machine implementations. When he was first accepted to Google Summer of Code 2010, he used inspiration from Paul Biggar's PhD on the optimization of dynamic languages to develop a proof of the concept GCC frontend to compile Python. This project sparked his deep interest in how Python works. After completing a consecutive year on the same project in 2011, Philip applied to Cython under the Python foundation to gain a deeper appreciation of the standard Python implementation. Through this he started leveraging the advantages of Python to control the logic in systems or even add more high-level interfaces, such as embedding Flask web servers in a REST API to a system-level piece of software, without writing any C code. Philip currently works as a software consultant for Instil Software based in Northern Ireland. He develops mobile applications with embedded native code for video streaming. Instil has given him a lot of support in becoming a better engineer. He has written several tutorials for the UK-based Linux Format magazine on Python and loves to share his passion for the Python programming language.
Read more about Philip Herron

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The public keyword


This is a very powerful keyword in Cython. It allows any cdef declaration with the public modifier to output a respective C/C++ header with the relative declaration accessible from C/C++. For example, we can declare:

cdef public struct CythonStruct:
    size_t number_of_elements;
    char ** elements;

Once the compiler handles this, you will have an output of cython_input.h:

 struct CythonStruct {
    size_t number_of_elements;
    char ** elements;
};

The main caveat, if you're going to call the Python public declarations directly from C, is that, if your link model is fully embedded and linked against libpython.so, you need to use some boilerplate code to initialize Python correctly:

#include <Python.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
    Py_Initialize ();
    // code in here
    Py_Finalize ();
    return 0;
}

And before calling anything with the function, you need to initialize the Python module example if you have a cythonfile.pyx file, and compile it with the...

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Learning Cython Programming (Second Edition) - Second Edition
Published in: Feb 2016Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781783551675

Author (1)

author image
Philip Herron

Philip Herron is a developer who focuses his passion toward compilers and virtual machine implementations. When he was first accepted to Google Summer of Code 2010, he used inspiration from Paul Biggar's PhD on the optimization of dynamic languages to develop a proof of the concept GCC frontend to compile Python. This project sparked his deep interest in how Python works. After completing a consecutive year on the same project in 2011, Philip applied to Cython under the Python foundation to gain a deeper appreciation of the standard Python implementation. Through this he started leveraging the advantages of Python to control the logic in systems or even add more high-level interfaces, such as embedding Flask web servers in a REST API to a system-level piece of software, without writing any C code. Philip currently works as a software consultant for Instil Software based in Northern Ireland. He develops mobile applications with embedded native code for video streaming. Instil has given him a lot of support in becoming a better engineer. He has written several tutorials for the UK-based Linux Format magazine on Python and loves to share his passion for the Python programming language.
Read more about Philip Herron