alt Hacker News> NodeJS does not have a good FFI story, and neither does Rust or Go. Yes, there's support, but Python's FFI support is actually better here.
Huh. I've found Rust's FFI very pleasant to work with. I understand that Zig's is second to none, but what does Python offer in this domain that Rust (or Go) doesn't?
Replies
eklavya • yesterday at 8:23 AM
Real world experience for the author which they probably lack in other langs. It would be an absurd statement otherwise.
Rust's problem is similar to Go's - the language makes some very strong guarantees, and FFI breaks those guarantees, so trying to work with FFI in those languages "infects" the codebase and breaks the value-add of working with the codebase to begin with.
In Rust's case, it's the necessity of wrapping FFI with unsafe. Memory deallocation e.g. cudaFree() is just part of the underlying reality; trying to handle memory management in a language with a borrow checker rather defeats the purpose of using a language with a borrow checker in the first place. Python lets library authors write __enter__ and __exit__ dunder methods to ensure that memory deallocation is handled correctly via Python context managers, which is a much more elegant abstraction. Yes, in Rust you can implement the Drop trait, but then the caller needs to remember to put the object in its own block... like I said, it's definitely possible with Rust, it's just not as nice of a story.