New Swig/Boost.Python alternative?

[jbosch (Jim Bosch)]

I just saw this on the Python C+±SIG email list. Haven’t had a chance to look at the code, but the description sounds very promising:

after being a long-time Boost.Python user, I’ve been working on an alternative that makes more effective use of recent C++11-capable compilers. The overall syntax and ideology are very similar to Boost.Python, but the implementation only requires a few header files with a a vastly smaller amount of code thanks to C++11 lambda functions, tuples and variadic templates. There is also dedicated support for Python’s buffer protocol and NumPy arrays, which is useful for scientific computing applications.

So far it’s only used by a few projects, but I think it could be useful to this audience.

Code: https://github.com/wjakob/pybind11
Documentation: http://pybind11.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

[jsick (Jonathan Sick)]

Should we plan on setting up a small-scale prototype to see if pybind11 is a nicer glue than SWIG?

cc/ @timj in the spirit of your lsstx experiment.

[swinbank (John Swinbank)]

I skimmed some documentation, and agree it sounds promising. I think @natelust was planning to try it out in one of his “20% time” projects, so he might have some comments on how well it works in practice in a few weeks.

An additional concern would be about the long term maintenance and stability of the project: so far, it seems to be a one person effort developed over the course of the summer. In other words, the bus factor is pretty low. Before investing too much time on it, we’d need to consider if whether we could count on it in the long term (e.g. by allocating our own resources to keep it alive if the original author abandons it).