[pypy-dev] cppyy on Ubuntu 14.04

[Toby St Clere Smithe]

Hi all,

exarkun at twistedmatrix.com writes:
> Also, I wonder if Reflex could turn into a "real" project - or maybe
> it is one already.  Does it have a version control system or issue
> tracker (eg on bitbucket, like PyPy)?  Downloading a source tarball
> from a user directory on a random host makes it look ... fly-by-night?
> I'm a little worried about building software on this - will it
> suddenly disappear, is there any development activity, etc.

I've been thinking about this. Reflex is part of ROOT[1], so I think it
does count as a 'real project'; Wim will clarify, I'm sure. But my
thinking is as follows: currently, it is hard to build an extension
using a C++ library for both CPython and PyPy. Reflex makes this easier,
but it is only available on CPython via PyCintex, which means (I think)
you need to build ROOT, or at least dig into the ROOT build system,
which is not particularly convenient.

Currently, I have a CPython extension that uses Boost.Python, and I
would like to find a Python-C-API-agnostic way of wrapping it. Reflex
would seem to be a good step in that direction, but it is a shame that
it and PyCintex are (it seems) rather locked into ROOT. It would be
great if -- like the Reflex tarball distributed for use with cppyy --
these bits could all be distributed and built separately, so that
building portable C++ extensions could be a lot easier, and that this
could be done widely.

Right now it would be very hard for me to switch from boost.python,
because it is very easy to build and distribute extensions using
boost.python, without requiring the user has complex dependencies
installed.

[1] http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/reflex

Cheers,

Toby

-- 
Toby St Clere Smithe
http://tsmithe.net