Dear all,
Having to build binary wheels for many platforms and Python versions is super-exhausting for package maintainers (and that’s even with tooling like cibuildwheel). I just spent a significant amount of time to port nanobind to the stable ABI so that I won’t ever have to do think about this again in the future. The API/ABI lacked features that painstakingly had to be added for this to work.
The combination of limited API + stable ABI constitutes a promise made by the Python community. It says “If you put in extra work to implement your project with this smaller set of functions, we guarantee that it will run in future Python versions without recompilation.” It therefore makes me sad to see a discussion about intentionally breaking such an important promise here.
While it’s easy to say “I have grown weary of this agreement … let’s get rid of it!”, such a course of action will cause an untold amount of tedious work downstream, and it will break the contract of stability (i.e. the whole point of this API/ABI in the first place).
In response to @pf_moore: ABI3 has just become good enough for many projects. For my projects, Python 3.12 will be the first release where the limited ABI is finally complete enough so that I can make the switch and avoid the fragility of so having many builds. Now @markshannon wants to tear it all down. This is so frustrating!