CFFI release 0.3

Hi everybody,

We released CFFI 0.3. This is the first release that supports more than CPython 2.x :-)

• CPython 2.6, 2.7, and 3.x are supported (3.3 definitely, but maybe 3.2 or earlier too)
• PyPy trunk is supported.

In more details, the main news are:

• support for PyPy. You need to get a trunk version of PyPy, which comes with the built-in module _cffi_backend to use with the CFFI release. For testing, you can download the Linux 32/64 versions of PyPy trunk. The OS/X and Windows versions of _cffi_backend are not tested at all so far, so probably don't work yet.
• support for Python 3. It is unknown which exact version is required; probably 3.2 or even earlier, but we need 3.3 to run the tests. The 3.x version is not a separate source; it runs out of the same sources. Thanks Amaury for starting this port.
• the main change in the API is that you need to use ffi.string(cdata) instead of str(cdata) or unicode(cdata). The motivation for this change was the Python 3 compatibility. If your Python 2 code used to contain str(<cdata 'char *'>), it would interpret the memory content as a null-terminated string; but on Python 3 it would just return a different string, namely "<cdata 'char *'>", and proceed without even a crash, which is bad. So ffi.string() solves it by always returning the memory content as an 8-bit string (which is a str in Python 2 and a bytes in Python 3).
• other minor API changes are documented at http://cffi.readthedocs.org/ (grep for version 0.3).

Upcoming work, to be done before release 1.0:

• expose to the user the module cffi.model in a possibly refactored way, for people that don't like (or for some reason can't easily use) strings containing snippets of C declarations. We are thinking about refactoring it in such a way that it has a ctypes-compatible interface, to ease porting existing code from ctypes to cffi. Note that this would concern only the C type and function declarations, not all the rest of ctypes.
• CFFI 1.0 will also have a corresponding PyPy release. We are thinking about calling it PyPy 2.0 and including the whole of CFFI (instead of just the _cffi_backend module like now). In other words it will support CFFI out of the box --- we want to push forward usage of CFFI in PyPy :-)

Cheers,

Armin Rigo and Maciej Fijałkowski