Extending a C++ App

[Mark Rowe]

Hello,

>I looked at SWIG
>However I have a few concerns (forgive me if Im being dense)
>
>(1) All the examples are created as DLLs (ie APIs)
>     This is fine - except how would my C++ App use the same object instances?
>     (ie. share the memory and API objects)
>

Last time I looked I couldn't find much information on this topic, 
but after stumbling around in the dark for a while I found the 
function SWIG_NewPointerObj, which takes a pointer and creates a 
PyObject * of the specified type from it.  This can then be inserted 
into a Python namespace using the Python C API.


>(2) SWIG does not do a nice job of object wrapping (in my opinion)
>     For instance instead of saying
>       c = example.Circle
>       c.x = 10
>       c.y = 20
>       del c
>
>     I need to do this:
>       c = example.new_Circle()
>       example.Shape_x_set(c,10)
>       example.Shape_y_set(c,20)
>       delete_Circle(c)
>
>     Isn't there a cleaner library somewhere to do this?

To get around this, tell SWIG to generate shadow classes for the 
objects.  eg, use the command `swig -python -c++ -shadow circle.i'. 
This will generate a Python source file with classes that wrap the 
methods you mentioned above (example.new_Circle, etc).

Mark Rowe