generic way to access C++ libs?

[Jacek Generowicz]

aleaxit at yahoo.com (Alex Martelli) writes:

> Jacek Generowicz <jacek.generowicz at cern.ch> wrote:
>    ...
> > Maybe not _immediately_ obvious, but obvious after a few minutes
> > thought :-)
> 
> To somebody with a good grasp of the current state of C++ technology,
> maybe.  Somebody who might just like to using existing dynlib/&c which
> happen to be oriented to C++ rather than C might quite reasonably not
> find the distinction obvious, IMHO.

I Absolutely agree ... which is why I put the smiley there.

> Anyway, if my guess is correct that the demand for such a 'c++types'
> is really burning only on Windows,

What's behind this guess ?

> I think Boost Python, if all needed tools were present, might be
> able to do a more automatic job of producing the wrapper,

Hmmm. Boost does refuse to make any assumptions, and therefore
requires human intervention in quite a few cases. Maybe default
assumptions could be built into Pyste. Maybe they already have; it's a
while since I looked at Pyste.

And I also suspect that, in practice, there will be a fairly low limit
on the size of library that Boost can wrap, because of compile-time
memory consumption. ISTRT wrapping about 20-30 methods taken from
about 5 classes used up half a Gb of RAM. So you probably don't want
the throw Boost at a whole library indiscriminantly.

Having said that, I recall that was some utility being developed to
split the compilation into small submodules, as an attempt to manage
the memory explosion.