SWIG overhead

[Bart Ogryczak]

On Feb 1, 12:48 pm, "Diez B. Roggisch" <d... at nospam.web.de> wrote:
> > Yeah, found that one googling around. But I haven´t fund anything more
> > up to date. I imagine, that the performance of all of these wrappers
> > has been improved since then. But the performance of Python/C API
> > would too?
> > Anyways, it´s not about exact number, it´s more about taking decision
> > if doing rewrite is worth it´s time.
>
> The wrappers essentially create the boilerplate-code that invokes the Python
> C-API. So whatever improvements the latter has been developed, the wrappers
> will benefit from it.

Without doubt it´s true in case of SWIG, but if I understand
Python.Boost documentation correctly, it does *not* use Python/C API.

> I doubt that there are major performance penalties associated with any of them.

Take a look at pages 23 and 24 of http://people.web.psi.ch/geus/talks/
europython2004_geus.pdf

> More important for a wrapper-decision is the question how easy they are to use.

Well, SWIG is easy to use. But I´ve gotta make hundreds of millions of
calls, which do tasks as simple, as getting one int from an array and
returning it. With functions that simple SWIG´s overhead seems to be a
problem.