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CFFI extension for faster execution times

The 8vim keyboard layout calculator calculates the scores of millions of layouts which takes time (around 13 minutes on a laptop with the default configuration using PyPy). When you try different configurations, you spend a lot of time waiting.

For faster execution times, the two "bottleneck" functions testSingleLayout and getTopScores have been rewritten in C. See the article Speed up Python with CFFI for how these function were determined as bottlenecks.

This "C extension" can be used in main.py thanks to CFFI, the C Foreign Function Interface for Python. If you use the PyPy interpreter, cffi should be already installed. Otherwise it can be installed via pip install cffi. See Installation and Status for details.

If you want to use the C extension, you need to enable it in the configuration file config.py: Set USE_CFFI to True.

Usage

1. Decide on Interpreter pypy3
(recommended)		 python3
2. Install package (Linux only?) pypy3-dev python3-dev
3. Get cffi Included by default Run pip install cffi
4. Build code Run cd cffi && pypy3 cffi_extension_build.py ; cd .. Run cd cffi && python3 cffi_extension_build.py ; cd ..
5. Start optimizer Run pypy3 main.py Run python3 main.py

Remarks:

  • Step 2: If there is no pypy3-dev (or python3-dev) package for your distribution (p.e. Arch Linux), just install pypy3 (or python).
  • Step 4 will use a C compiler in the background. If you don't have one installed, install one (p.e. gcc, clang or tcc) and try again.