Mastering Python

C/C++ extensions

The previous chapter already covered this somewhat, as it's a requirement to compile the C/C++ files. But that chapter didn't explain what and how the setup.py was doing in this case.

For convenience, we will repeat the setup.py file:

import setuptools

spam = setuptools.Extension('spam', sources=['spam.c'])

setuptools.setup(
    name='Spam',
    version='1.0',
    ext_modules=[spam],
)

Before you start with these extensions, you should learn the following commands:

• build: This is actually not a C/C++ specific build function (try build_clib for that) but a combined build function to build everything within setup.py.
• clean: This cleans the results from the build command. This is generally not needed but sometimes the detection of files that need ...