[Numpy-discussion] ANN: XDress v0.1 -- Automatic Code Generator and C/C++ Wrapper

[Anthony Scopatz]

Hello All,

I am spamming the lists which may be interested in a C/C++ automatic
API wrapper / code generator / type system / thing I wrote.  I'll keep
future updates more discrete.  I'd love to help folks get started with this
and more participation is always welcome!  Release notes are below.

Please visit the docs: http://bit.ly/xdress-code

Or just grab the repo: http://github.com/scopatz/xdress

Be Well
Anthony

========================
XDress 0.1 Release Notes
========================
XDress is an automatic wrapper generator for C/C++ written in pure Python.
Currently,
xdress may generate Python bindings (via Cython) for C++ classes & functions
and in-memory wrappers for C++ standard library containers (sets, vectors,
maps).
In the future, other tools and bindings will be supported.

The main enabling feature of xdress is a dynamic type system that was
designed with
the purpose of API generation in mind.

Release highlights:

  - Dynamic system for specifying types
  - Automatically describes C/C++ APIs from source code with no
modifications.
  - Python extension module generation (via Cython) from C++ API
descriptions
  - Python views into C++ STL containers.  Vectors are NumPy arrays while
maps
    and sets have custom collections.MutableMapping and
collections.MutableSet
    subclasses.
  - Command line interface to the above tools.

Please visit the website for more information: http://bit.ly/xdress-code

Or grab the code from GitHub: http://github.com/scopatz/xdress

XDress is free & open source (BSD 2-clause license) and requires Python 2.7,
NumPy 1.5+, PyTables 2.1+, Cython 0.18+, GCC-XML, and lxml.

New Features
============

Type System
-----------
This module provides a suite of tools for denoting, describing, and
converting
between various data types and the types coming from various systems.  This
is
achieved by providing canonical abstractions of various kinds of types:

* Base types (int, str, float, non-templated classes)
* Refined types (even or odd ints, strings containing the letter 'a')
* Dependent types (templates such arrays, maps, sets, vectors)

All types are known by their name (a string identifier) and may be aliased
with
other names.  However, the string id of a type is not sufficient to fully
describe
most types.  The system here implements a canonical form for all kinds of
types.
This canonical form is itself hashable, being comprised only of strings,
ints,
and tuples.

Descriptions
------------
A key component of API wrapper generation is having a a top-level, abstract
representation of the software that is being wrapped.  In C++ there are
three
basic constructs which may be wrapped: variables, functions, and classes.
Here we restrict ourselves to wrapping classes and functions, though
variables
may be added in the future.

The abstract representation of a C++ class is known as a description (abbr.
desc).
This description is simply a Python dictionary with a specific structure.
This structure makes heavy use of the type system to declare the types of
all needed
parameters.

Mini-FAQ
========
* Why not use an existing solution (eg, SWIG)?

    Their type systems don't support run-time, user provided refinement
types,
    and thus are unsuited for verification & validation use cases that often
    arise in computational science.

    Furthermore, they tend to not handle C++ dependent types well (i.e.
vector<T>
    does not come back as a np.view(..., dtype=T)).

* Why GCC-XML and not Clang's AST?

    I tried using Clang's AST (and the remnants of a broken visitor class
remain
    in the code base).  However, the official Clang AST Python bindings lack
    support for template argument types.  This is a really big deal. Other
C++ ASTs
    may be supported in the future -- including Clang's.

* I run xdress and it creates these files, now what?!

    It is your job to integrate the files created by xdress into your build
system.

Join in the Fun!
================
If you are interested in using xdress on your project (and need help),
contributing
back to xdress, starting up a development team, or writing your own code
generation
front end tool on top of the type system and autodescriber, please let me
know.
Participation is very welcome!

Authors
=======
XDress was written by `Anthony Scopatz <http://scopatz.com/>`_, who had many
type system discussions with John Bachan over coffee at the Div school, and
was
polished up and released under the encouragement of Christopher
Jordan-Squire at
`PyCon 2013 <https://us.pycon.org/2013/>`_.
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