[C++-sig] Patches and complete pyste replacement prototype for pyplusplus

[Matthias Baas]

Allen Bierbaum wrote:
> On 2/25/06, Roman Yakovenko <roman.yakovenko at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Allen and Matthias many thanks to you for your work. Meanwhile I have been
>> working on my own version. I still a little bit busy, I will review
>> every version and I promise to
>> take the best parts from all 3 proposals. It will take some time.
> 
> Would you and Matthias be interested in collaborating on the review
> and "taking the best parts" from the 3 proprosals?  

Sure (aren't we doing that already to some degree? ;)...
Roman, I'd also like to hear how your version will differ from ours. Is 
it based on the same concepts than ours or is it something new? Now that 
we already have two separate implementations I think before creating a 
third one, it would be useful to discuss the pros and cons of the things 
we have and then create an improved API.
I suppose eventually it would be more productive if we would all work on 
the same code instead of having three separate "branches".

> For example I
> could volunteer the wiki that I have been using a a place to
> collaborate on a unified API description.

Any "documentation tool" is fine with me as long as there actually *is* 
any documentation. As you might have noticed, I was using doxygen which 
has the advantage that the doc strings can be used for the final 
implementation (which I did *after* writing the documentation) and you 
don't have to copy the stuff out of the wiki. But of course, it's not as 
open to the public as a wiki is...

> I read through Matthias's reply to my posting and have gotten a much
> better understanding of where our efforts differ.  I like many of
> Matthias's ideas and I would like to integrate some of them into the
> API I have been using for my bindings.  There are a few things I have
> questions about, but that is exactly what the collaboration could help
> to iron out.

So let's hear your comments and questions and what ideas you do (and do 
not) like to integrate.

> On a related topic: Roman, what did you think of the patches to
> pygccxml/pyplusplus?  If we were able to work through getting some of
> those things accepted I think it would enable many variations on the
> public API since they could all use the same features on the backend
> to interface with pyplusplus.

I haven't looked at Allen's patch, but I agree that a stable internal 
pyplusplus/pygccxml interface would definitely be useful to prevent our 
individual efforts from diverging too much.

Roman Yakovenko wrote:
 >> Would you and Matthias be interested in collaborating on the review
 >> and "taking the best parts" from the 3 proprosals?  For example I
 >> could volunteer the wiki that I have been using a a place to
 >> collaborate on a unified API description.
 >
 > Definitly. I think, that the main test should be usability. Can you 
setup some
 > C++ project? After this everyone will create Python bindings with his
 > proposed API.

I think each of us already has a C++ project which we're using to test 
pyplusplus and the respective API. Allen uses it for wrapping OpenSG and 
I'm using it for wrapping the Maya SDK (which is a commercial 3D 
package). I think this is a far better test than coming up with a dummy 
project (where chances are pretty good that we would miss a lot of things).

 > Thus, we will be able to compare and critic every API.

That's what I did in my previous mail. And actually, as I tried to 
emphasize, Allen's and my version are pretty close. The basic concept is 
the same, I'd say we were just focusing on different areas. You could 
simply take one version and extend it with the stuff from the other 
version and both of us would be happy. :) So I don't see them as two 
competing proposals where you have to decide either for one or for the 
other.

- Matthias -