On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 10:11 PM, Carl Witty <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 8:08 PM, David Cournapeau <[email protected]> > wrote: > > On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Carl Witty <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> In my opinion, the major advantage of C++/CLI over C# with P/Invoke is > >> that C++/CLI has a working C++ header file parser. This means that we > >> can keep the current Cython semantics, where users describe to Cython > >> the API (rather than the ABI) of the library they're trying to call; > >> then Cython generates C, C++, or C++/CLI code that conforms to this > >> API, and the compiler handles the rest. > > > > So just to be sure I understand, using C++/CLI gives you a way to > > generate the C++ wrapper needed to expose a C-like ABI to cython (and > > python runtime) ? A bit like python boost does ? > > Well, not exactly. Cython can already deal with a C++ API (better in > the not-yet-released 0.13 than in previous versions); I would say that > Cython itself is the tool that takes a C++ API and exposes a C ABI to > the Python runtime. The advantage of C++/CLI is that it can directly > consume C and C++ APIs (as expected, since it's basically a superset > of C++). With C++/CLI there isn't really a wrapper. I identified two > reasons for a wrapper; one is to translate C or C++ APIs into known > ABIs, and the other is to catch and deal with C++ exceptions. With > C++/CLI, neither is needed (just like we don't need a wrapper when > generating C++ to target CPython). > > > It seems to me that having a "toolchain" to do this would also be > > useful for auto-generating .pxd from header files directly. May be > > enough to motivate me to continue the work I started there using clang > > > > It seems that fixing this would solve the issue for both java and C# > > output at the same time, which is a good point. > > You're talking about a toolchain to generate C-ABI wrappers for > arbitrary C++ code? That would indeed be a good place to start for > JVM or C# Cython backends. (Although there would still be a lot of > work involved; like I said, Cython currently targets C++ APIs > directly, so there would be a lot of changes to make it target your > wrappers instead.) > > Carl > _______________________________________________ > Cython-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/cython-dev > I don't know much about Cython internals, but if something could be done that would facilitate Cython interop with Jython, IronPython, Pypy, clpython, hotpy and maybe even pyjamas (perhaps not pyjamas because pyjamas is going to mostly be used for running things in a browser without a plugin), that would probably be a very good thing for Python in general. Pypy is probably the most noteworthy Python implementation that seems to be getting left out of the discussion so far (but I admit, I've not read the whole thread). One quick note about C++/CLI: IIRC, it's a bit like Cython itself. ISTR that C++/CLI can call C/C++ ABI and .Net ABI callables, much as Cython can call CPython, C and C++ callables. -- Dan Stromberg
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