[pypy-dev] GSoC proposal - C++ binding

[Igor Trindade Oliveira]

On Tuesday 24 March 2009 14:13:25 Leonardo Santagada wrote:
> On Mar 24, 2009, at 2:18 PM, Neal Becker wrote:
> > Igor Trindade Oliveira wrote:
> >> Hi guys,
> >>
> >> i was talking with some pypy guys about work in this summer in GSoC
> >> with
> >> C++ bindings to Pypy and i wrote a proposal and i like that you
> >> review it.
> >>
> >> Igor
> >>
> >> PROPOSAL:
> >>
> >> Problem
> >>
> >> Pypy are becoming one of the most used Python interpreter because
> >> it is
> >> easy and flexible, but we still have a big problem, it does not
> >> have any
> >> binding to any Graphical User Interface(GUI) and we have the second
> >> problem, many GUIs are wrote in C++(like Qt or WxWidgets) and Pypy
> >> can not
> >> access C++ code because it does not have any C API, it just can
> >> access C
> >> code using ctypes.
> >>
> >> Solution
> >>
> >> Many solutions had been argued but the main solution is use
> >> Reflex[2],which is developed at CERN (which has an incredible
> >> amount of
> >> C++ libraries). It is not mainly intended for writing Python
> >> bindings for
> >> C++ libraries but instead provides reflection capabilities for C++.
> >> The
> >> idea is that for every C++ shared library, an additional shared
> >> library is
> >> produced, which allows together with Reflex to introspect
> >> properties of
> >> C++ classes, methods, etc. at runtime. These facilities are then
> >> used for
> >> writing a small generic CPython extension module, that allows
> >> CPython to
> >> use any C++ library for which this reflection information was
> >> generated
> >> [3]. This approach is a bit similar to the ctypes module, apart
> >> from the
> >> fact that ctypes does not use any reflection information, but the
> >> user has
> >> to specify the data structures that occur in the C code herself. This
> >> makes it sometimes rather burdensome to write cross-platform library
> >> bindings. For PyPy the approach seems rather fitting: We would need
> >> to
> >> implement only the generic extension module(a C language interface to
> >> Reflex) and could then use any number of C++ libraries.
> >
> > ...
> > I wonder if py++ would help?
>
> When people were looking at what would be best to use they considered
> py++ (and boost.python).
>
> One of the reasons to not use it is that if I remember correctly py++
> uses gcc-xml and it needs the source of the C++ library before
> generating some cpython module that needs to be compiled also. One of
> the good points of Reflex is that after the generation of the
> reflection library you don't need the source of the package neither a
> compiler installed, and reflex supports c++ also (which would be
> interesting if we want to convince OS people of including reflex
> modules of c++ libraries).
>
> Could Reflex be made to generate a reflex module of c packages also,
> so you don't have to declare them again in ctypes in python and all
> languages that support libffi? That would be cool.

right now i dont know but i can check it, but i believe that it just works 
with C++ packages.

Igor Trindade Oliveira
>
> --
> Leonardo Santagada
> santagada at gmail.com
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> pypy-dev at codespeak.net
> http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/pypy-dev