SWIG vs. ctypes (Was: ANN: PyEnchant 1.5.0)

rfk ryan at rfk.id.au
Tue Nov 25 16:43:36 EST 2008


> I'd be interested to hear about your
> experiences with both and why you switched.

Enchant has a pretty simple C API so the binding process was
straightforward with both SWIG and ctypes.  The only real trick was in
passing python functions as callbacks to the C API, for which I found
ctypes a little easier to use.

The switch wasn't motivated by any problems with SWIG, but simply
because ctypes seems to have a lot of momentum on the alternate python
implementations such as PyPy, Jython etc.

As others have noted, ctypes unfortunately doesn't support C++
bindings. There was a recent post on the PyPy blog discussing options
for C++ that you might be interested in:

   http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2008/10/sprint-discussions-c-library-bindings.html


 Cheers,

   Ryan



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