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I'm looking around for a way to program some gui apps in ubuntu 12.04.

I ran across the quickly tutorial and the tool looks fantastic.

It looks like the primary language you develop with is python, which is fine with me.

But I know that I will need to link in C (or other compiled) code for intensive number crunching and to take advantage of the huge number of binary libraries out there.

I understand that python is designed so that you can link c code into it (although I don't know anything about the details, such as whether it can be done dynamically, or whether you have to build a new python interpreter executable, etc).

So my question is whether it is possible to fit in linked C (or other compiled) code into the quickly workflow, and if you do, can you still build deb packages to distribute your code. (I wouldn't mind writing a few makefiles or scripts or whatever to do this.)

And are there any examples out there that I could take a look at?

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I think the short answer is no, Quickly was not designed to mix and match Python and C code.

If you are interested in this topic, I'd suggest reading the Python documentation on how to extend the language with C.

My suggestions would be though, to either:

  • Write the application in Python, and benchmark the performance of your number-crunching routines. This will give you some data to decide whether Python is fast enough for your purposes, or
  • Write the application solely in C

If you want to link existing C libraries into Python code, you might also want to have a look at ctypes. Here's a quick example for Linux libs.

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  • Thanks David. That does answer my question. (My interest in Quickly was for easy gui creation, and attachment to c libraries which already exist. So before figuring out how much trouble it is to go through the extension process --- and thanks for the link, btw --- i need to know how much extra effort it is to patch back into the product Quickly is building. But you have answered that for me, so thanks again.)
    – dan
    Commented Aug 1, 2012 at 3:35
  • In that case, you might be interested in reading wiki.python.org/moin/IntegratingPythonWithOtherLanguages - perhaps ctypes is what you want?
    – David Planella
    Commented Aug 1, 2012 at 9:21

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