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Comment by krona | Hacker News Reader

The repository mentions "other languages" but I could only find Python examples?

While I think wrapper generators are a noble idea, I doubt I would choose this over the convenience of IDL-like metaprogramming approaches (e.g. pybind11, or Boost.Python)

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Metaprogramming such as pybind11 does is neat. Thanks for the pointer to the project. It still looks like manually written C extension modules to me based off of what I see in https://github.com/pybind/pybind11/blob/master/docs/basics.r.... Just much shorter code with a lot of the hard to get right details taken care of you. Good! Better than the status quo. But it doesn't abstract the problem away very much. (no doubt some will consider that a feature)

What if I also wanted my wrapper available on a non CPython VM? The proper way to use PyPy is not via its fake CPython API support (slow and memory hungry). Imagine if a PyPy Generator were added to CLIF. It'd use the same interface definition Parser but generate an entirely different set of code. In PyPy's case that would probably be a C library wrapping the C++ for generated cffi based Python code to interact with.

Admittedly all hypothetical here until other Python VMs have CLIF Generator implementations.

Semi-related, in case you haven't seen it:

http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/cppyy.html

Thanks! Eek! An XML interface definition. In 2017!

CLIF is designed to support arbitrary front-end languages--and other languages are in the exploratory phases. But there is no full support for other languages at this time.

Doesn't the IDL approach require that the declarations/intermediate language be written manually though? Most C++ libraries out there don't have any IDL files (looks at QT)

I mean IDL-like, as in valid c++ that is almost as easy to read as an IDL (to me at least) but without losing the ability to dive in to the binding if necessary. If you're trying to produce a binding that feels idiomatic in the target language, I'd say this is important, and this is where Swig-like approaches show their weakness.

I think the author of Swig shares this sentiment: (http://code.activestate.com/lists/python-dev/109281/).

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