4 ms·

Have you used pybind? I've used SWIG extensively so I'm familiar with that - you talked about SWIG but not how it compares to this new one. Reading through som

Have you used pybind? I've used SWIG extensively so I'm familiar with that - you talked about SWIG but not how it compares to this new one. Reading through some docs, it looks like pybind suits better for a python codebase that occasionally needs C++ pieces added in as you have to setup the C++ code to handle the py needs. SWIG I was always impressed with exactly your point. You could sometimes just make 1 big header file in a facade pattern to expose some "start" buttons needed to run a huge c++ application and nothing else needed to be setup. No going back and forth. Example usage here was a single heavy duty image processing application but using python has the distributor and work manager. C++ code was a "worker" and python and zeroMQ did everything else. So the only "connection" we needed was a start button and some metadata to the c++. Maybe 1 header file with 100-200 lines of code to make the bridge for SWIG. (to anyone else reading) does that sound trivially simple to the do the same with pybind?

ThePhysicist 9y ago
I haven't used pybind yet, so I can't compare the two unfortunately. From how I understand the docs it seems you would have to write the interface definitions in C++ and the compiler would generate the bindings for you, which sounds like a nice approach that could be a bit more cumbersome though as (again, in my understanding) forces you to write and adapt all bindings by hand.
- brational 9y ago
  >could be a bit more cumbersome though as (again, in my understanding) forces you to write and adapt all bindings by hand. That was my interpretation as well.
sqeaky 9y ago
SWIG is amazing. I have usually taken a different approach so that I could get the scaling you talk about. I point SWIG at the real headers in my projects and use ifdefs to block out things don't want SWIG to see. There are also a few rules that should be followed when doing this. Things like: don't let SWIG see overloads if the other language doesn't support them; don't return raw pointers that need to be deleted; don't let swig see std headers, etc... Then I make SWIG (optionally) run as part of the build. Any warning it makes need to be resolved somehow because CI will reject commits causing warnings. It cost just a little more dev time, but prevents eons of debugging time.

ThePhysicist 9y ago

I haven't used pybind yet, so I can't compare the two unfortunately. From how I understand the docs it seems you would have to write the interface definitions in C++ and the compiler would generate the bindings for you, which sounds like a nice approach that could be a bit more cumbersome though as (again, in my understanding) forces you to write and adapt all bindings by hand.

brational 9y ago
>could be a bit more cumbersome though as (again, in my understanding) forces you to write and adapt all bindings by hand. That was my interpretation as well.

sqeaky 9y ago

SWIG is amazing. I have usually taken a different approach so that I could get the scaling you talk about. I point SWIG at the real headers in my projects and use ifdefs to block out things don't want SWIG to see. There are also a few rules that should be followed when doing this. Things like: don't let SWIG see overloads if the other language doesn't support them; don't return raw pointers that need to be deleted; don't let swig see std headers, etc... Then I make SWIG (optionally) run as part of the build. Any warning it makes need to be resolved somehow because CI will reject commits causing warnings. It cost just a little more dev time, but prevents eons of debugging time.