Wrapping a C library in Python

[Jean Brouwers]

Take a close look at Pyrex at

<http://nz.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/python/Pyrex/>


/Jean Brouwers
 ProphICy Semiconductor, Inc.


In article <roy-99F088.20103518112004 at reader1.panix.com>, Roy Smith
<roy at panix.com> wrote:

> I've got a C library with about 50 calls in it that I want to wrap in 
> Python.  I know I could use some tool like SWIG, but that will give me a 
> too-literal translation; I want to make some modifications along the way 
> to make the interface more Pythonic.
> 
> For example, all of these functions return an error code (typically just 
> errno passed along, but not always).  They all accept as one of their 
> arguments a pointer to someplace to store their result.  I want to 
> change all that to returning the result directly and throwing exceptions.
> 
> I also want to mutate some of the return types.  A common way these 
> functions return a set of values is a pair of arrays of strings, forming 
> key-value pairs.  In Python, it would make sense to return this as a 
> dictionary.
> 
> I know what I'm describing is kind of vague, but are there tools around 
> which might help automate (at least in part) this translation process?