Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH RFC] pyembed: integer python into QEMU

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>]

On 01/16/2012 12:35 PM, Alex Bradbury wrote:
> On 16 January 2012 18:22, Anthony Liguori<aliguori@us.ibm.com>  wrote:
>> This is something I started during 1.0-rc on a lark and spent some time last
>> night actually making work.  I'm sending it only to show that (1) it's possible
>> and (2) to get some input about what other people think as a longer term
>> direction.
>
> At the risk of starting a language flame-war, have you considered
> embedding something like Lua?The source of the core Lua interpreter is
> small enough that it could be imported into the Qemu repository.

Generally, I don't think importing external source code is a Good Idea.  Part of 
the appeal to me about Python is the rich library that it brings in.

I'm less interested in Python for it's list comprehension syntax and more 
interested in it for it's config parsing library, RPC infrastructure, etc.

Plus, I'm reasonably confident that most QEMU developers have some experience 
with Python.  I'd wager that very few people have any practical experience with LUA.

So in terms of embedding, I think Python is the only reasonable path forward (if 
we think we should even head in this direction).

> There
> may also be advantages to having access to LuaJIT (on supported
> platforms) for its speed and FFI library [1] which could make it
> feasible to prototype new device models in a high level language with
> good performance.

Python has a simple FFI module (ctypes).

Regards,

Anthony Liguori


> Alex
>
> [1] http://luajit.org/ext_ffi.html
>