Roughly the same experience. Automatic generation for anything more than trivial examples always seems to lead to the need for more and more configuration to keep everything in line, to the point where just writing everything by hand becomes less work. This is likely due to the type of software we use it for, but still, the amount of time I lost on SWIG really seems wasted instead of leaving the feeling of having learnt at least something. It was all not very pleasant. The Python side of our software gets exposed to less tech-savvy users and is meant to be a more friendly layer over C++ functions and classes. But the C++ side isn't really an API in the sense there is no hard distinction between the 'internal' layer and the API layer. Some class which is only used internally might the next day also be wrapped to be available in Python. So there's no single directory or so one can point to and say 'everything in there is the API'. Also given a C++ class, sometimes only a couple of methods have to get exposed to the users, sometimes with a different name even, or some arguments defaulted etc. Preferrably without having to write a wrapper just for the sake of exposing it. All this turned out to be a nightmare in SWIG. Just manually writing one or more lines for registering the function manually (not Boost.Python but similar) is usually a one-time-almost-never-look-back thing which, for us, is way less work in the end. Even with the hundreds of functions we have already. And of course performance is the other advantage.