Incrementally converting a C app to Python

[Nick Craig-Wood]

BJörn Lindqvist <bjourne at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Hello. At work I'm the sole maintainer and developer of a medium sized
>  ~50k line C application. The lion share of this app was written before
>  my time so it is pretty hard to read and also contain lots of bugs.
>  I'm contemplating converting the project to Python because I think
>  that, in the long run, maintenance will become much easier. And also
>  because is so much more fun than C.

As long as python is fast enough, then go for it!

>  The app is to big to be rewritten from scratch so I'm thinking of a
>  way to rewrite it "incrementally." Something like one module, or file,
>  at a time. Using tools like SWIG, Pyrex or embedding Python in C it
>  seems like this would be possible. My question is what tools should I
>  apply and what strategy should I use? Would it be best to use a
>  top-down approach and rewrite the main files first and work my way
>  down wrapping the remaining C files using SWIG? Or should I convert
>  the isolated code files to Python and then embedd it in the C code?
>  Maybe Pyrex help me with this task? Any insight on this matter is
>  greatly appreciated. Surely someone has done the exact same thing as
>  me before.

In my experience it is easier to embed C into python than python into
C.  This is because there are lots of tools to help you with embedding
C into python (eg swig or ctypes), but the other way round you are
more on your own.

So I would re-write the main application loop in python, then swig all
the C files and mash them all together.  This approach will work well
if the C app is well modularised.  If not you'll have to work the
other way round, embedding bits of modularised python into C.

I'd try to convert as much as possible into python in the first pass
though.  Anything involving string manipulation, hash lookups, linked
lists etc will be much easier in python and you'll find you'll make 1
line of python for 5-10 lines of C probably - so maybe that 50k LOC
doesn't look so scary as 5k-10k LOC in Python.

I bet your C code doesn't have unit tests either...  Make sure you
write those as you are going along in Python.  It will make more code,
but it will give you a wonderful feeling of confidence that your code
will actually work, and work the same as the C code.

-- 
Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick