Python in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

The Python Standard Library and Extension Modules

There is more to Python programming than just the Python language: the standard Python library and other extension modules are almost as important for effective Python use as the language itself. The Python standard library supplies many well-designed, solid, 100 percent pure Python modules for convenient reuse. It includes modules for such tasks as representing data, string and text processing, interacting with the operating system and filesystem, and web programming. Because these modules are written in Python, they work on all platforms supported by Python.

Extension modules, from the standard library or from elsewhere, let Python code access functionality supplied by the underlying operating system or other software components such as graphical user interfaces (GUIs), databases, and networks. Extensions also afford maximal speed in computationally intensive tasks such as XML parsing and numeric array computations. Extension modules that are not coded in Python, however, do not necessarily enjoy the same cross-platform portability as pure Python code.

You can write special-purpose extension modules in lower-level languages to achieve maximum performance for small, computationally intensive parts that you originally prototyped in Python. You can also use tools such as SWIG to wrap existing C/C++ libraries into Python extension modules, as we’ll see in Extending Python Without Python’s C API. Finally, you can embed Python in applications ...