Added sections for SWIG and boost.python

This commit is contained in:
aaron
2015-10-26 23:45:11 -05:00
parent 44ca0b19a6
commit 2dea4bc5ee
+64
View File
@@ -40,3 +40,67 @@ Struct Equivalents
class my_struct(ctypes.Structure):
_fields_ = [("a", c_int),
("b", c_int)]
SWIG
----
`SWIG <http://www.swig.org>`_, though not strictly Python focused (it supports a
large number of scripting languages), is a tool for generating bindings for
interpreted languages from C/C++ header files. It is extremely simple to use:
the consumer simply needs to define an interface file (detailed in the
tutorial and documentations), include the requisite C/C++ headers, and run
the build tool against them. While it does have some limits, (it currently
seems to have issues with a small subset of newer C++ features, and getting
template-heavy code to work can be a bit verbose), it provides a great deal
of power and exposes lots of features to Python with little effort.
Additionally, you can easily extend the bindings SWIG creates (in the
interface file) to overload operators and built-in methods, effectively re-
cast C++ exceptions to be catchable by Python, etc.
Example: Overloading __repr__
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
:file:`MyClass.h`
.. code-block:: c++
:linenos:
#include <string>
class MyClass {
private:
std::string name;
public:
std::string getName();
};
:file:`myclass.i`
.. code-block:: c++
:linenos:
%include "string.i"
%module myclass
%{
#include <string>
#include "MyClass.h"
%}
%extend MyClass {
std::string __repr__()
{
return $self->getName();
}
}
%include "MyClass.h"
Boost.Python
------------
`Boost.Python <http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_59_0/libs/python/doc/>`_
requires a bit more manual work to expose C++ object functionality, but
it is capable of providing all the same features SWIG does, and then some,
to include providing wrappers to access PyObjects in C++, extracting SWIG-
wrapper objects, and even embedding bits of Python into your C++ code.