Re-use of standard library across implementations

[alanjds (Alan Justino da Silva)]

@brettcannon

We had a discussion at the core dev sprint and I think we would be willing to entertain a PR that implements a pure Python implementation of a module

Thank you for positioning about this subject.

@brettcannon

we are after something that is actually being used

My plan is to use _pycodecs.py in Grumpy, propose it to be used on RustPython and look for others and their interest (Micropython and Transcrypt to start).

Micropython for example support only utf-8, is not extensible and have codecs.py as a dummy. Having codecs.py importable in this environment would fix some issues on their side.

In fact, I already started hacking a _pycodecs.py.

Side question:

python/cpython/blob/main/Lib/codecs.py#L83

Is there a performance reason for this to be a tuple or I can replace with a bare old object to simplify some code? Assuming backwards compatibility and tests passing, of course.

[brettcannon]

@alanjds

Is there a performance reason for this to be a tuple or I can replace with a bare old object to simplify some code?

@alanjds

Assuming backwards compatibility and tests passing, of course.

That first part pretty much guarantees you shouldn’t change it without a really good reason. That doesn’t mean you can’t open an issue on bugs.python.org to discuss changing it, though.

[alanjds (Alan Justino da Silva)]

Right. I will keep the changes on the existing stuff as minimal, if any. Will mute about this for a while until I have a draft of _codecs.py.

@brettcannon

We had a discussion at the core dev sprint and I think we would be willing to entertain a PR that implements a pure Python implementation of a module to start.

@brettcannon

Obviously we are after something that is actually being used

I can see this as an understanding of stdlib being intentionally useful for other Python implementations. And also as a hook to bring back the main question here, that I may had hijacked on the way :

@windelbouwman

As a rustpython developer, I would like to be able to share parts of the python standard library in an easy way. We are now in the process of copying libraries from the cpython sourcecode base into our source repository, but this has a clear downside in that the libraries will get out of sync eventually.

Should we start creating suggestions on how it could work better than today?

[brettcannon]

@alanjds

I can see this as an understanding of stdlib being intentionally useful for other Python implementations.

More that we don’t want people submitting a backport for something they decided to do some weekend for fun. We are after in-use code that has been tested and is being relied upon already.