[Pythonmac-SIG] WxPython for MacPython

Jack Jansen jack@oratrix.nl
Wed, 15 Mar 2000 00:25:58 +0100


I'm all for a wxMacPython, but I'm afraid I can't be of any help here, 
short of the occasional bit of good advice. And here's the first bit
(unsolicited:-):

Recently, Chris Barker <cbarker@jps.net> said:
> NOTE: Robin is is ing SWIG to build most of wxPython, so the first step
> would be to get SWIG working on the Mac, which would be handy for other
> purposes as well. Anyone working on that? (http://www.swig.org/)

I would strongly suggest using bgen in stead of SWIG, especially if
you (or Robin) knows the header files well. Bgen is much harder to
setup than SWIG, but once you've set it up it has two major
advantages: (1) it knows everything about which C structures should be
considered object types in Python and creates all those objects, with
the functions operating on them as methods, the PyArg_ParseTuple glue
routines to allow them to be passed as parameters to other calls,
etc. and (2) if a new release of the underlying software comes out
building a new Python module is usually catered for by re-running bgen.

Without bgen the interfaces to the mac toolbox would have been
unmaintainable. Every time apple adds 45 new calls to, say, quicktime, 
it takes me about 25 seconds to have them supported in Python. With
SWIG you'd first have to create the .i files (although this can
possibly be semi-automatic) and then you'd have to add all that Python
glue code to create an OO interface to the lowlevel C interface.
--
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