Hi @EarlMilktea I am not sure if this makes sense, but perhaps I can explain the intention from #8442 first, and then you can tell me if I missed anything 🙂

First of all, we own these functions; they are not defined somewhere else, so technically cdef extern is a bit confusing. But more importantly, we need them to be exposed with C linkage, so that we can load these symbols via ctypes or other means (ex: dlopen) by (unmangled) name, ex:

Maybe we can start by confirming the symbols are still exposed under the same names after this change, and then add a simple test coverage? If this change can still expose the symbols just fine, I agree we should not need to generate/package a header.

@leofang (CC: @kmaehashi )

Thank you for pointing out the problems!
How about closing this PR and adding the file to .gitignore for better DX for now, as the role of the file is much more important and complex than I expected?

I thought cdef extern can be used to expose symbols but will double check.

I thought cdef extern can be used to expose symbols but will double check.

The symbol is exported using cdef extern but as C++ linkage, which is not what we want. I'll add it to gitignore in #8813.