Hi Gregory, On Sat, Mar 2, 2013 at 8:40 AM, Gregory P. Smith <greg@krypto.org> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 7:57 AM, Eli Bendersky <eliben@gmail.com> wrote:
So would you say that the main use of the API level is provide an alternative for writing C API code to interface to C libraries. IOW, it's in competition with Swig?
I'd hardly call it competition. The primary language I interface with is C++ and cffi appears not see that giant elephant in the room
I don't think it's in competition with Swig, which does C++. There are certain workloads in which C++ is the elephant in the room; we don't address such workloads. If you want some more motivation, the initial goal was to access the large number of standard Linux/Posix libraries that are C (or have a C interface), but are too hard to access for ctypes (macros, partially-documented structure types, #define for constants, etc.). For this goal, it works great.
(it'd need to use clang for parsing if it were going to do that)...
I fear parsing is merely the tip of the iceberg when we talk about interfacing with C++. A bientôt, Armin.