Segmentation Fault when importing both pikepdf and fastText about pikepdf HOT 2 CLOSED

I'm not an ABI expert or anything, but I have a feeling there's a problem in that generally direction.

I think you should try building both from source in a Python virtual environment that also has pybind11 installed, so that both also use the same pybind11 version. If you were using the pikepdf binary wheels (likely from the procedure you showed) then you're using a version that was linked against different (but theoretically ABI compatible) standard libraries from yours.

They may also be compiled with different pybind11 versions.

Unrelatedly, if you're only interested in text extraction from PDFs, pdfminer.six may be a better fit. pikepdf doesn't do text extraction, since that is very complex on its own. In general the sequence of characters to plot in a PDF content stream are glyph IDs in a font, not character IDs. If you're lucky there's a 1:1 correspondence between glyph IDs and Unicode, but in general this isn't the case.

from pikepdf.

First of all, thanks for the interest @jbarlow83

I also thought that the problem is that there is some kind of collision that occurs between the compiled code of fasttext and pikepdf's. However, I tried (as your instructions to install pikepdf from source say) to install both qpdf and pikepdf with an specified compiler (by setting CC and CXX flags to gcc and g++ respectively), but got the same error as you specify in these instructions (the ImportError one, because it seems that setup.py is not getting the same compiler even with the env variables CC and CXX set up), so I ended up giving up.

After that, I tried to install fasttext from this pip package: https://pypi.org/project/fasttext/
And the problem seems to be gone. I do not know if it is that pip is solving some kind of collision that was happening before, or if it is the fact that pip is compiling the binding with the same compiler. So for now, I am going to stick with that solution, because I am far from understanding how pybind11 works and why the Seg. Fault could be happening.

from pikepdf.