Created by: wangkuiyi

I read and followed this article http://intermediate-and-advanced-software-carpentry.readthedocs.io/en/latest/c++-wrapping.html, which compares the following interfacing technology:

1. manual wrapping. I followed this official Python document for more details: https://docs.python.org/2/extending/extending.html for some example programs. There includes some complex boilerplate code -- parsing argument in each C function, build and return Python object in each C function, and the method list.

2. SWIG. It seems a general method that can generate bindings for various client languages, but not "native" enough. Also, it takes some time to learn the interfacing language (*.i files).

3. ctypes. This requires us to respecify the return type and other meta-data about each C function at the Python side, again.

4. SIP. This is the Qt community's version of SWIG. We also need to learn an interfacing language.

5. Boost.Python. This is some C++ templates that simplify the manual wrapping. We no longer need to write a C wrapper function for each C++ function. Only a few extra lines in addition to the original C++ code are required to build a .so that can be called from Python.

I personally prefer Boost.Python. Here is an example for your reference:

Suppose that we already have C++ functions like:

char const* greet() {
   return "hello, world";
}

only the following few lines is required to build the Python-callable .so file:

#include <boost/python.hpp>

BOOST_PYTHON_MODULE(hello_ext) {
  boost::python::def("greet", greet);
}