Francisco Fernández Castaño

Python is a great language, but there are occasions where we need access to low level operations or connect with some database driver written in C or we need to overcome to some speed boottleneck in Python due to some limitation in the language, like NumPy or Scikit-learn do, using extensions.

With the FFI(Foreign function interface) we can connect Python with other languages like C, C++ and even Rust or Fortran. There are some alternatives to achieve this goal, Native Extensions, Ctypes and CFFI. We'll compare this three ways of extending Python and we'll study pros and cons of each approach.

Python is a great language, but there are occasions where we need access to low level operations or connect with some database driver written in C or we need to overcome to some speed boottleneck in Python due to some limitation in the language, like NumPy or Scikit-learn do, using extensions.

With the FFI(Foreign function interface) we can connect Python with other languages like C, C++ and even Rust or Fortran. There are some alternatives to achieve this goal, Native Extensions, Ctypes and CFFI. We'll compare this three ways of extending Python and we'll study pros and cons of each approach.

As Python programmers we're used to program without taking care about allocating memory for our objects and later on freeing them, Python garbage collector takes care of this task automatically for us.

Garbage collection is one of the most challenging topics in computer science, there are a lot of research around the topic and different ways to tackle the problem.

Knowing how our language does this process give us a better understanding of underlying interpreter and allow us to know why problems like cycles can happen in CPython interpreters.

So, this talk aims to be and introduction to the topic and a walkaround through different approaches followed in CPython and PyPy:

• Generational Reference counting with cycles detector on CPython.
• Incremental version of the MiniMark GC on PyPy.

As Python programmers we're used to program without taking care about allocating memory for our objects and later on freeing them, Python garbage collector takes care of this task automatically for us.

Garbage collection is one of the most challenging topics in computer science, there are a lot of research around the topic and different ways to tackle the problem.

Knowing how our language does this process give us a better understanding of underlying interpreter and allow us to know why problems like cycles can happen in CPython interpreters.

So, this talk aims to be and introduction to the topic and a walkaround through different approaches followed in CPython and PyPy:

• Generational Reference counting with cycles detector on CPython.
• Incremental version of the MiniMark GC on PyPy.