ABI Wheels
Domain: Package Ecosystem
🎯 Motivation
ABI (Application Binary Interface) tags on wheels indicate Python’s internal C-level compatibility. Understanding ABI tags like cp311 ensures your wheel matches the user’s Python interpreter.
đź“‹ Concrete Example
A wheel named mypkg-cp311-...whl works with CPython 3.11’s ABI. It will not load on Python 3.10 because the internal C structures differ, even though both are “Python 3.”
đź”— Analogy
Plugs and sockets have shapes (types) that must match physically. Two round-pin plugs look similar, but if the pin spacing differs, they do not fit. ABI is that pin spacing for Python’s C layer.