[Python-Dev] Inline and SWIG

[Greg Ewing]

David Beazley <beazley@cs.uchicago.edu>:

> I've looked briefly at Inline and agree that it's a pretty nifty
> approach.  However, usability aside, it's got a number of pretty major
> limitations once you start getting into structure wrapping, C++
> classes, and other advanced types of extension wrapping.

Indeed, you've put your finger on what seems like the
biggest problem with the current crop of semi-automatic
extension generators.

I don't think there is ever going to be a completely
automatic solution to this, because, once you get beyond
the basic types like ints, floats and strings, there is
no unique mapping between Python types and C types.

While the tool could provide some sort of default
translation for arbitrary types, it's unlikely to be
what you need to interface directly with some existing
C library you're trying to wrap. So you're faced with
writing a lot of tedious and error-prone code for messing 
with PyObjects and reference counts.

I've had some ideas floating around in my head for a
while concerning what to do about this. The key
observation is that such code usually spends a lot
more lines manipulating Python data than it does C
data, which leads me to the conclusion that C is the
wrong language to write it in. 

What's the right language? One that's good at manipulating
Python objects. Which language is the best at doing
that? Why, Python, of course. But not just Python,
because we need to be able to manipulate C data
structures as well. So we need a language that looks
like Python at one end and C at the other...

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury,	   | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a	  |
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