Python for Decision Makers and Business Leaders Transcripts
Chapter: Python vs.
Lecture: Python with C++
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So far, it's been versus. This or that.
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Python or MATLAB.
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Which one do you want?
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But when it comes to C and C++
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Python was actually built with C.
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If you look at the thing you download
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it's actually called CPython
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because it is written in C.
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It happens to run Python
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but the implementation that makes it go is C.
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So Python integrates really well with C and C++.
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There's a couple of ways you can do it.
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You can make libraries in C++
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and here's the extension story on how you do that.
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You can import Python.h into your C++ file
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and off you go.
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There's a library called CFFI or the C types module
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that lets you plug these two things together
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so you can write a core low level bit in C or C++
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maybe it's taking to hardware or whatever
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and then it's very easy to turn that into
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a Python function or class that you can just work with
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as you've seen so far.
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So this is a cool story but it goes further than that.
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There's also this thing called Cython
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CPython, drop the P, Cython
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and it looks like pure Python.
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Here's a silly little math function
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where we're going along and just adding up the distance
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or computing the distance over and over
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and kind of throwing that away.
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It doesn't really do anything useful
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but that's not the point.
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Notice how we put type information on the variables.
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Do math start which is an integer
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and number which is an integer. That's normal Python.
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We haven't done it yet. It's a newer feature.
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We could have done it all along and it's fine
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but if you do this, you can actually run Cython against this
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and what it will do is compile it to C
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and then at C, then it will compile the machine instructions
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and it's as if you had written this directly in C or C++.
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Moreover, you can actually in this world
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in this Cython world, you can start importing
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and working with C functions and classes and so on
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so you can directly create this boundary
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where C and Python touch each other
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but you still write Python code.
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So here's another way in which Python and C and C++
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come together.
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Finally, if you want to look a little more into this
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check out this article over here on realpython.com
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Building a Python C Extension Module.
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It takes you step by step of what you actually have to do
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to make C work with Python.
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It's actually not that complicated.
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Well that does it for our versus round.
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Hopefully those comparisons were meaningful
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and gave you a good sense of what some of the trade offs are
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between all these different programming languages
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and technologies.
