Other Extending Tools

In closing the extending topic, I should mention that there are alternatives to SWIG, some of which have a loyal user base of their own. This section briefly introduces some of the more popular tools in this domain; as usual, search the Web for more details on these and more. All of the following are currently third-party tools that must be installed separately like SWIG, though Python 2.5 is scheduled to incorporate the ctypes extension as a standard library module by the time you read this.

SIP

Just as a sip is a smaller swig in the drinking world, so too is the SIP system a lighter alternative to SWIG in the Python world (in fact, it was named on purpose for the joke). According to its web page, SIP makes it easy to create Python bindings for C and C++ libraries. Originally developed to create the PyQt Python bindings for the Qt toolkit, it can be used to create bindings for any C or C++ library. SIP includes a code generator and a Python support module.

Much like SWIG, the code generator processes a set of specification files and generates C or C++ code, which is compiled to create the bindings extension module. The SIP Python module provides support functions to the automatically generated code. Unlike SWIG, SIP is specifically designed for bringing together Python and C/C++; SWIG also generates wrappers for many other scripting languages.

ctypes

The ctypes system is a foreign function interface (FFI) module for Python. It allows Python scripts to access and ...

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