Meador Inge <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
> Personally I prefer using attributes instead of pragmas.  The GCC manual recommends such as well.

I followed www.akkadia.org/drepper/dsohowto.pdf . Drepper seems to be fine
with the use of pragmas in internal headers.

> There are also other sources in Modules/* that use '__attribute__ ((visibility ("hidden")))'.  Namely ctypes and zlib.

They do, but for a tiny amount of functions. mpdecimal.h, which is internal
as far as _decimal.so is concerned, also needs to be changed. There you have
something like 200 lines of

[...]
void mpd_qrescale(mpd_t *result, const mpd_t *a, mpd_ssize_t exp, const mpd_context_t *ctx, uint32_t *status) Py_HIDDEN;
void mpd_qrescale_fmt(mpd_t *result, const mpd_t *a, mpd_ssize_t exp, const mpd_context_t *ctx, uint32_t *status) Py_HIDDEN;
[...],

which increases the size of the diff between the standalone libmpdec and the
one shipped with Python.