[racket] How about a python ffi for Racket?

One of my former student researchers performed this work (Daniel Silva supervised by Philippe Meunier). My rough impressions: 
 -- he tried three different approaches in roughly 2003-2005, the embedding Racket into a C process seemed to work best 
 -- nothing worked perfectly at the time because of the impedance mismatch in memory models and memory reclamation 
 -- our goals were strictly research-oriented (running #lang Python code via the Python run-time and analyzing it)
	[the Python community was so negative that my students lost interest]
 -- the two implementations were integrated to the point where you could exchange any data (though see memory) 
	and run some mutual callbacks. 
 -- I don't think it would be possible to have a general-purpose FFI but that's my personal gut-feeling judgment 
For Bassett's intentions this would work well from what I can tell though it may not eliminate the actual performance bottleneck. 

That's about all I can say -- Matthias




On Oct 4, 2013, at 2:49 AM, Andrews, Kyle (KC) wrote:

> Near the end of Matthew Bassett’s talk at RacketCon someone mentioned that the Racket developers had integrated Racket with python several times in the past.  If so, what are the challenges towards creating a general purpose python ffi for Racket?  As someone else who does a lot “guerrilla” Racket programming as an engineer in a large (non-software) company, it would be extremely pleasant to have easy access to the plethora of more standard scientific tools available there (and thus also to those available in R, and MATLAB, through libraries like RPy) for prototyping but without leaving the comforts of DrRacket.
>  
> Kyle Andrews
>  
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