[gst-devel] Can't make gstreamer work

[David Given]

[...]
> I'm not sure what performance will be like but it certainly would be
> interesting to subclass gst classes and do stream data processing with
> numeric python extensions.

Eeek! Stream processing in Python would be... slow. Also having the ability
to actually write plugins in Python would mean...

> The interaction between threads, cothreads, python vm, and python
> extensions boggle my mind.  Anyone know if there are any obvious problem
> with all this?

We're talking thunking here, in a very big way. You'd be spending an awful lot
of time wrapping gstreamer objects into Python objects and unwrapping them again
afterwards.

IMO, Python is great as an application infrastructure, and rather bad at number
crunching. As gstreamer is based around number crunching I would be rather
disinclined to build Python in.

However, I think Python would make a *great* language for building applications
that contained gstreamer pipelines. No nasty fiddling around with C pointers
and memory allocation, just let Python do it all. For this application, swig
and a mirror Python class structure would do very nicely.

It would be nicer to use the gtk2 introspection stuff, but gtk2 isn't really
out in stable form yet...

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