Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Python/PyObjC on iOS

[James R E. <jam...@lr...>]

Le 9 sept. 2010 à 17:08, Ronald Oussoren a écrit :

> Now that Apple seems to allow writing apps in python I'm no longer opposed to including patches to enable PyObjC on iOS devices and would be willing to review and apply such patches.

Excellent news.  Let's hope that our interpretation of the announced developer agreement changes is accurate.

> Porting libffi is non-trivial if you are not familiar with low-level C code and assembly.  If there is already a port for a jailbroken environment is should be possible to get that to work in a "jailed" environment as well.

I tried rebuilding it myself, including the jailbreak patches, but for whatever reason, the version I used caused everything it touched to barf.  But I haven't looked at it in some time.  As you suggested, libffi pokes into the deep dark depths, which for me remain a mystery, so I'm not sure I really know how to go about debugging it.  Part of it may stem from our creating a fake cross-compilation environment by hand.  Yuck.

> BTW. How good/bad is the performance of Python code on iOS devices?  Performance and battery use are the primary reasons I'd be hesitant to use Python code on iOS devices for anything but prototypes.

Given the problems we faced with libffi, we were only able to get the core python libraries to load, so we weren't able to stress test it.  And without libffi, we wouldn't be able to get PyObjC running, so we back-burnered the project.  As such, I really can't comment on observed performance, but I would likewise be hesitant to use Python or PyObjC for anything but prototypes.

Cheers,
James

--
James R. Eagan
LRI — Bâtiment 490
Université de Paris-Sud XI          email: Jam...@lr...
91405 Orsay Cedex — France          web: http://www.lri.fr/~eaganj