CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++pythonapi
Stephen
Stephen

Reputation: 620

C++ API as an Python Extension Module

Can APIs written in C or C++ always be made into a library, given source code, and consequently be called from Python, due to the intrinsic callable nature of an API?

In other words, given a C/C++ API can you run a setup.py script using distutils on the source and effectively use the C/C++ API from python programs?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 290

Answers (3)

Gearoid Murphy
Gearoid Murphy

Reputation: 12116

There is no intrinsic or automated mechanism for binding a C++ API to Python. It must be done manually. The best tool I've seen for this purpose is Boost Python.

Of course, given the clean mapping between C++ Object Oriented programming and Python OO code, it shouldn't be too difficult to create a script which parses C++ headers and produces the binding declarations. GCC-XML will give you an xml representation of parsed headers, which can be easily queried by a python script to produce the bindings. That said, there's probably a great deal of detail I've not anticipated which could prevent this approach from working.

Upvotes: 0

Thomas K
Thomas K

Reputation: 40370

It's a bit more involved than running a setup.py script, but there are tools to wrap C/C++ libraries so you can use them from Python. Some popular ones are:

  • Cython - you write Python-style code, but you can cimport C libraries and call their functions. Cython code is then translated to C and compiled. There's an unsupported tool called cython-codegen to automate writing a simple wrapper.
  • boost.python - For wrapping C++ libraries.
  • SWIG
  • ctypes - Load compiled libraries and call them directly from Python. ctypesgen tries to automatically write a wrapper based on header files.

Certain projects use other tools to generate Python bindings, and they could probably be reused (with varying amounts of effort). PyQt4 uses SIP, PySide (another Qt binding) has shiboken, and GTK et al. have Gobject introspection.

Upvotes: 1

TJD
TJD

Reputation: 11896

It's not exactly that simple, but basically you can do that using SWIG, which will generate the necessary wrappers to bind your python and C/C++ code. http://www.swig.org/Doc1.3/Python.html

Upvotes: 0

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