[Tutor] Moving my C++ code to Python?

[Paul]

Hi there,

I've been using C/C++ for many years (python, just reading about it).

I have a software written in C/C++ but considering porting most of it
to python, as it seems like it's a better choice for decision making
portion of the code.  I'm also thinking about having a 'matlab' like
interface for reading, processing, and writing.

In my current C++ code, I would read data into a vector of structs
(which contains other simple vectors, strings, and structs) and it can
be as large as 500MB to 2GB.  The data gets processed (requires random
access).  The result is then written out.

I would like to make modules for python.  The problem is that the
vector of structs that is very large.  First, is it possible to pass
such structures around to and from python and C/C++?  What would be
the overhead cost of having a large structure that needs to be passed
to and from the C/C++ modules?

# I imagine I'd use the newly written software this way:
>>> import c_stuff  # my C/C++ module
>>> largestuff = c_stuff.read(file)  # read from disk
>>> c_stuff.process(largestuff, someparams1)  # processing, requires random access to the vector
>>> c_stuff.process(largestuff, someparams2)
...
>>> c_stuff.process(largestuff, someparams10000) # the whole thing may take a few minutes to days
>>>
>>> import python_stuff # some module written in python to process the data as well
>>>
>>> python_stuff.process(largestuff, otherparams1)  # It's important that this data can be read (and I hope written) by python code
>>> python_stuff.process(largestuff, otherparams2)
>>>
>>> c_stuff.write(largestuff) #write result

Thank you in advance,
Paul