On 05/08/2012 02:14 AM, Matthew Scouten wrote:
Hello, I have recently been laid off from a job where a made a lot of good use of Boost.Python. I would like to give something back (while incidentally keeping my skills from getting rusty). I have already been following the boost-python tag on stackoverflow and answering a lot of question there (http://stackoverflow.com/users/8508/matthew-scouten). I haven't hacked on the internals of BP much, but now that I have time.While I was there, I had some code (now lost to me) that made BP easier to use. Here is some of that I had: * A deepcopyable suite, so that any c++ class with an appropriate copy ctor could be quickly given a __deepcopy__, a __copy__ and a copying __init__, with a single line. * A similar compare suite, so that classes with == and< could be given a full set of comparison operators, with a single line * 2 function templates, SafePointer2Object and SafeObject2Pointer which dealt with conversions between bp::objects that might be None and pointers to c++ classes that might be NULL * Simple RAII objects that dealt with acquiring and freeing the GIL around callbacks on different threads. A similar one for freeing the GIL around a code block. An idea that maybe this could be a call policy. * No_compare_indexing_suite is vector_indexing_suite for classes without == I would like to recreate some of these up for inclusion in BP, if you are interested. Or if there is other work that needs doing....
All of these sound very useful, and I'd love to see any of them in Boost.Python (well, to be honest, I don't use threading much, so I don't have much need for the GIL tools, but I know others on this list seem to be GIL-wrangling all the time).
Another thing to consider is C++11 support, and particularly support for the C++11 standard library. I don't know think any of the original library builders or maintainers has any plans to devote any of their own time to add support for e.g. std::tuple or even std::shared_ptr and unique_ptr, but that's going to be increasingly important as C++11 compiler support gets better. Being able to wrap C++ functions that take rvalue reference arguments would be another important C++11 feature to support, but possibly a lot harder.
Thanks! Jim _______________________________________________ Cplusplus-sig mailing list Cplusplus-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/cplusplus-sig
